[tex-live] install-tl redownloads everything on each run

[Norbert Preining]

Hi Yaroslav,

> I've faced a problem (with download) during install-tl run. I rerun
> that. The problem is that it  redownloads everything from the very
[...]
> A better behaviour would be to redownload only those packages, for
> which the download failed.

We are well aware, and we had in former times a mechanism that kept the
downloaded packages around and re-used them for installation, so that
no double download happened.

Then, lots of people complained that during an installation of scheme-full
the disk usage exploded to about 6+ Gb (due to full installation plus 
one set of all packages).

Thus, for now  we delete the packages.

Furthermore, continuing an aborted installation by reading the already
installed packages and only install the rest: This is not possible at
the moment, and I am not sure how to guarantee that all files of all the
hitherto installed packages are actually installed.

Package managers like dpkg (on Debian) hit hard on the hard disk by syncing
files permanently to guarantee consistency. I am not sure if we want to 
do something like this for install-tl.

What might be possible is the following: If install-tl breaks down and writes
a profile, then it already knows that the installed packages are fine, and
writes a hint into the profile, so that a restart of the installation 
can continue from there. I will look into it.


Last but not least, on sx you wrote
	I have no idea how to implement the crypic instruction

	install-tl --profile installation.profile [EXTRA-ARGS]

well, the EXTRA-ARGS are those arguments you passed in to install-tl
on the original installation, like --repository or something else...
In most cases not necessary. So in most of the cases you simply do
	install-tl --profile installation.profile
*AS*IS*.

Hope that helps

Norbert

--
PREINING Norbert                               http://www.preining.info
Accelia Inc.     +    JAIST     +    TeX Live     +    Debian Developer
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