[tex-live] iso file

[George N. White III]

On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 8:42 PM, Paul Gesting <pgesting at odysseysr.com> wrote:
> I am trying to install TexLive on a linux machine that is behind a firewall,
> so I cannot use the install script. Also, I am not root so I cannot use the
> package installer (or mount an iso). I downloaded the iso and in an attempt
> to bypass writing it to a DVD, I simply used the linux archive to extract
> the iso. I found out that when you do that, it breaks all the sym links and
> they become just empty files (a name, with zero file size). I tried it in
> Windows with 7-zip and it did the same thing.
>
> I know that this was my fault, but it might be helpful on the iso page
> (http://www.tug.org/texlive/acquire-iso.html) to state that you must either
> mount it or burn it - you cannot extract the files directly. I did not know
> that they were sym links so it took me a long time to figure this out (I
> simply thought the files were missing!) Apparently no one else has tried
> this because I spent many hours with google trying to figure it out and
> found nothing.
>
> Thanks
> Paul Gesting

A discussion of much the same issue is
<https://bugs.launchpad.net/unetbootin/+bug/373089>

Your situation is not that unusual, and likely to become more common if
the current trend towards "security trumps all other concerns" continues.
My understanding is that there are a number of extensions to the basic
CDROM format that support links, long file names, etc.   Years ago I
SGI IRIX had the same sort of problem with data CD's until SGI
improved the support for extensions.   At the time there were ways
to get tables mapping the short filenames (which were often hashes)
to the "real" names, but I'm not sure if those were generated  by the
people who wrote the disk or could be recreated from information on
the CD's.  I don't have the tl .iso handy -- what do you get for the
symlinks from:  "isoinfo -lR -i <filename>.iso" (I assume the .iso
uses Rockridge extensions)?

You should be able to generate a table of the symbolic links in a
form that could be used (e.g., with a shell script) to repair a filesystem
created as you did by extracting a .iso, but maybe someone
else will suggest a tool that does the extraction properly without
additional steps.


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