[tex-live] minor problems with install-tl

Werner LEMBERG wl at gnu.org
Tue Oct 28 09:25:07 CET 2008


During a train ride (with a slow internet connection which often
stalled because the mobile connection was changed again and again) I
tried to start `install-tl -gui' on a friend's GNU/Linux laptop.  Here
my observations.  Note that I downloaded install-tl two days ago from
tug.org.

  . The script searched for a CTAN host and downloaded the database
    before anything else.  This is bad, since later on it continued
    with text-only mode because perl-tk wasn't installed.  Any reason
    why the availability of perl-tk can't be checked immediately after
    the start?

  . Neither CTAN host searching nor downloading the database gets
    announced in advance.  With a bad connection it appears as if the
    program hangs.  So please tell the user in advance what the script
    is doing.

  . Please add a status bar which shows how much of the database has
    been downloaded.  Ideally, with -gui, this should already happen
    with a small GUI window.


     Werner


More information about the tex-live mailing list