[tex-live] Bugs in install-tl for win32

[Siep Kroonenberg]

On Sat, Jun 28, 2008 at 01:23:14AM +0200, Staszek Wawrykiewicz wrote:
> On Fri, 27 Jun 2008, Dan Luecking wrote:
> 
> > I have done some additional testing of install-tl for WIN32.
> 
> Many thanks for your tests and notes.
>  
> > [...]
> >   Also removed my own versions of perl, tar, wget and lzma.]
> This is not needed. As I wrote before, TL uses those programs 
> (including small subset of perl) internally and there was big effort done
> to let people having them for all other tasks.
>  
> > I successfully installed texlive-medium. Formats were automatically
> > and successfully generated. The only non-routine messages were
> > warnings from tar:
> >    "Unrecognized file type '2', extracting as ordinary file".
> > this happened for several man1 pages. This was harmless as there are
> > no programs to display the man pages anyway.
> People can use their own man pager, or read man pages in emacs.
> And well, the warnings are harmless, as win32 doesn't understand symbolic 
> links, so tar unpacks all such links as regular files.
>  
> > I successfully ran tex, latex and pdflatex several times. I also ran
> > tplmg and successfully installed the cm-super package.
> Great! 
> 
> > - There was this serious bug: Registry entries are changed!!!
> >    I did not appreciate the fact that the rather inadequate psv
> >    program was substituted for gsview as the default for opening
> >    PostScript files. This should never be done without requesting
> >    permission and it should certainly not be done without informing
> >    the user.
> 
> Sure, but TL cannot provide gsview as it is not free software, so we 
> decided to put much faster psview. Making the default association for
> opening .ps files is always matter of disscusion. Anyway, I'm going to 
> update psview this weekend (finally added help in English and much more).
> 
> > - There is a second serious bug: Uninstalling TeXLive did not undo
> >    those registry changes. I took me quite some effort to determine
> >    how to change them back.
> 
> Thanks for noticing that. Siep, would you please remove also registry
> key for psv when uninstalling?

That still wouldn't restore the original file association with
gsview, although users could do that by reinstalling gsview. Trying
to restore a previous file association would be messy. It would be
better to make the psview file association an install option.

-- 
Siep Kroonenberg