[tex-live] temp *.lmza files during installation -- running out of [temp] disk space

[Harald Koenig]

Hi,

I was running out of disk space when trying to install TeXlive 2008 
on a Linux PC with limited disk space from an usbstick with a current copy of 

     ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/tex/CTAN/systems/texlive/tlnet/2008/

I noticed that while the install was running, in 

     /usr/local/texlive/2008/temp/

stayed all the *.tar.lzma files (4028 with 917 Mbytes all together 
for the 1827 packages (83 collections out of 84)).
file/package list available if needed.


why are all those *.lzma files kept in temp/ during installation ?

how can I tell tlmgr to delete the lzma files immediately after extraction/installation ?
this "saves" almost 1 GB disk spaces being required temporarily.



and some linux/unix centric questions/toughts:

I also noticed that the *.tar.lzma first get extracted and written to disk
as uncompressed *.tar before extracting the contents (fortuneately one at a time
and those *.tar files get deleted immediately afterwards;).

why

- are *.lzma files copied to destination disk in temp/ at all (install from DVD/usb-stick) ?
- are *.tar files written to disk ?

this all can be done in a pipe on _every_ unix system saving lots of  
disk I/O and temp space. 


for DVD/usb stick source something like

    cat $source_tar_lzma | unlzma | tar xf -

should be possible (and optimize away the extra process for "cat" in your
real implementation;), and for network installation using wget

    wget $source_url -O- | unlzma | tar xf -

should do the same with no additional disk traffic and temp disk space.



I know that creating short living temp files in linux isn't a big performace
problem (module file system problems -- e.g. "disk full":)  but quite some
legacy unix systems don't perform too well with that sort of I/O load...


comments welcome!

Harald
-- 
"I hope to die                                      ___       _____
before I *have* to use Microsoft Word.",           0--,|    /OOOOOOO\
Donald E. Knuth, 02-Oct-2001 in Tuebingen.        <_/  /  /OOOOOOOOOOO\
                                                    \  \/OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO\
                                                      \ OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO|//
                                                       \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Harald Koenig                                           //  /     \\  \
koenig at tat.physik.uni-tuebingen.de                     ^^^^^       ^^^^^