[tex-live] Installation problems on Windows Vista

[George N. White III]

On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 2:43 AM, Werner LEMBERG <wl at gnu.org> wrote:
>
>> (Manuel, it's your personal disaster having to reboot three times :-)
>
> To be serious again: The idea of copying the whole Perl stuff needed
> for running tlmgr looks like a good idea IMHO.  It still would mean
> shuffling around a few Megabytes, but it would elegantly avoid the
> file locking problems.  In other words, a Windows user should have to
> execute a batch file like this if clicking on the tlmgr icon:
>
>  <set up environment variables>
>  cpdir <tlmgrdir> <tlmgrdir-temp>
>  <tlmgrdir-temp>\tlmgr
>
> [This is how little Werner sees the Windows world.]

it would be interesting to try hard links (NTFS has them):

<http://www.flexhex.com/docs/articles/hard-links.phtml>

What are the Win32 (and BSD) equivilants of GNU "cp --link"?
Does perl.exe in TL support link?   Is anybody running
Win32 TeX Live on FAT filesystems (maybe USB stick)?

On real Win32 the link count from GNU "ls -l" is 2.   Furthermore,
in an NTFS partition that has a 4GB .iso file and 1.5GB free,
"cp --link file.iso link.iso" runs in a few seconds and does not
reduce the free space.    I suspect McAfee was responsible for
the delay.

Note that Wine hasn't implemented links (using GNU cp from
the GnuWin32), so you need real Win32 and NTFS to test:

C:\Testing>cp --version
cp (GNU coreutils) 5.3.0
C:\Testing>cp --link refcard.tex r2.tex
fixme:tape:BackupWrite (0x60, 0x62f9f0, 20, 0x62f7d8, 0, 0, 0x62f7dc)


-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia