[tex-live] "Invisible" errors during installation

[Philip TAYLOR]

Dear Siep --

Siep Kroonenberg wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 11:42:19AM +0000, Philip TAYLOR wrote:
>> would you like me to revert to e-mailing the list rather
>> than just you two ?
> 
> Please do.
> 
> As to the hang: PostMessage doesn't seem to do the job, so I am
> going to try SendMessageTimeout instead.

"Doesn't do the job" as in "Doesn't send a message",
or "Doesn't cure the hang" ?  As far as I can tell,
it cures the hang, but I have never seen any
message from the installer that I can recognise
as such, so I do not know if any of the versions
have ever successfully produced a message on
my system.  What format would you expect the
message to take, and in which window should it
occur ?

> A question: are these results from your virtual machine or from your
> live system? All these problems cost us an enormous amount of time,
> so I would like to be sure that we are debugging the TL installer,
> not your Windows installation.

Well, I have no wish to place any unneeded load on your time,
but equally I do not have any evidence to suggest that my
Windows installation is defective : the most recent error
reports were all from the live system, because having
proved in the VM that the hang did not occur, I needed
to get back to trying to find out why it /did/ occur
on the live system.  I think it is fair to suggest that
if SendMessage can cause a hang on my system, it can
cause a hang on others, and therefore we should try
to identify the cause and eliminate it.  To support
this, I think it is clear that Microsoft would not
have gone to the trouble of writing SendMessageTimeout
if timeouts were not expected to (a) occur, and
(b) cause problems.

** Phil.