[tex-live] Problem installing texlive2008

[Reinhard Kotucha]

George N. White III writes:
 > On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 6:48 PM, Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at> wrote:
 > 
 > > On Thu, 20 Nov 2008, Venkatesh, P.C. wrote:
 > >> Can't spawn "cmd.exe": No such file or directory at
 > [...]
 > Could this be caused by a PERL5LIB setting?   I think TL2007 and some 3rd
 > party perl apps set PERL5LIB.

That would be strange.  Neither the installer nor TeX Live 2008 itself
should ever interfere with any instance of Perl or Ghostscript
existing on your system already.

On Unix it's expected that these programs are installed already, on
Windows the installer temporarily sets PERL5LIB itself in order to use
the tiny Perl for Windows which is part of the installer and needed for
bootstrapping.

With other words:  The installer runs in its own environment and
overwrites PERL5LIB unconditionally.

And, coming back to P.C. Venkatesh's question: It's quite unlikely
that TeX Live 2007 is the culprit.  You don't have to delete TL-2007
in order to install TL-2008, but the environment variable TEXMFCNF set
by TL-2007 interferes with TL-2008 at run time, but not during
installation.  It has to be removed at least after TL-2008 had been
installed. 

Removing TEXMFCNF from the environment breaks TL-2007, but there is a
simple solution: Move texlive2007/texmf-var/web2c/texmf.cnf to
texlive2007/bin/win32/ and TEXMFCNF is not needed anymore. You have to
run texhash or mktexlsr after this change.

Then you can switch easily between TL-2007 and TL-2008.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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