TeX Live 2021 and FreeBSD 13.0

[Karl Berry]

Siep - specific suggestions for improvements to (hopefully, reductions in)
quickinstall.html are welcome.

Everything on quickinstall.html is there because it has caused users to
ask questions or be confused.

I agree that people want a download button. But what is it supposed to
be?  Of course we could make a "download button" to
https://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/install-tl.zip, but I am
doubtful it would benefit users. They click download, they get the zip
file ... then what.

Ok, likely they are smart enough to at least unpack it. Good. Then they
click "install-tl". It doesn't work because it's not executable due to
os overrides, or doesn't execute Perl on it, or doesn't execute the
right version of Perl. Now what?

Or, they click download, they get somewhere, but not very far.
Then they click download again, and have a half-installed tree.
That won't work well.

Worst of all, suppose they do the download, they run the installer, it
all works ... but they still have to adjust PATH. That is not a trivial
operation for some -- precisely those people who are most likely to
click "download" and expect everything else to be automatic. Of course
the installer says to do it when it finishes running, but anyone who
actually reads that text doesn't need a "download button" in order to
successfully do the download.

Or, people get the DVD from a user group. Then the whole "download"
concept is just confusion. Although I suppose hardly anyone installs
from the DVD any more, so maybe that's irrelevant now.

I could put the four lines into a section at the beginning of
quickinstall.html (tl;dr). The problem then is that people on Windows
and Macs don't, on the whole. want to run those four lines. They want to
do something different. And, on Unix, even choosing between curl and
wget has become a nightmare of its own, due to the certificate
expiration + os stupidity.

These are the kinds of scenarios I tried to address in
quickinstall.html, as briefly as possible (via references to other
documentation). I just don't know how to make it simpler without causing
confusion for all the people for whom the "one size fits all" download
doesn't work. Of whom there are many. --best, karl.