[tex-live] Installing TeX Live 2008 from the net : a review of steps taken and problems encoountered.

[Philip TAYLOR (Ret'd)]

To follow :

> Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

>> The main idea was to make index.html more noticeable.  All the other
>> files are hidden but can be accessed by following hyperlinks. 

The problem is, Windows displays directories before files.
Thus the directory "Readme.html" is far more noticeable than
the file "Index.html", and this will undoubtedly cause
some to double-click on the directory (thereby opening it)
rather than the file.  I think there is a simple solution :
don't use the ".html" suffix for the directory -- a name
such as "Resources" is sufficiently bland to avoid unwanted
investigation of its contents.

Incidentally, who (and how) is expected to read the
files "README.<whatever>" ?  They can't
be double-clicked in Windows (well, they can, but
then you have to tell it which program to use to
open it), and if you try to read one in Notepad
you find one infinitely-wide line :-(((  Should
these files, too, not be hidden in "Resources",
and made visible through some supplied utility
that can unmangle the line endings ?

Maybe -- and here I realise I'm treading on dangerous
ground -- the whole installer package could usefully
be divided into Windows and Unix branches, with those
few files common to both carefully tweaked so they can
be opened in both systems without difficulty or artifact.

** Phil.