[texhax] [tex-live] problems with tl2016 pretest

[Jim Diamond]

On Sat, May 14, 2016 at 09:32 (+0200), Zdenek Wagner wrote:

> 2016-05-14 0:14 GMT+02:00 Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org>:

>> it just may be an issue of the design of tl-install, in that it
>> doesn't overlap "download the next file" with "unpack this file".

>> Doing the operations (install package A while downloading the next
>> package B) concurrently is indeed beyond the scope of the
>> implementation as it stands.
Understood.

>> And it doesn't sound easy, or reliable, to accomplish :(. -k
> It is very difficult.
In principle, I find that surprising.  But if you mean "without a
significant re-write of the current implementation, it would be
difficult to do it", I'm happy to believe you.

> You have packages of different size
I don't see the relevance of that (except if someone designed a
program which would only work if all the packages were the same size,
which seems like a very curious design).
> and users have different bandwidth.
Nor that.
> In theory, you may quickly download several small packages if you
> have a gigabit line and it may cause concurrent unpacking and
> installation of several packages, so you may end up with many
> processes which will mean that yout tcp/ip subsystem might discard
> incoming packages due to overloading of the processor.
I think your concerns are specific to one class of designs.  But as
you already realized, as evidenced by your next sentence,
> It could be solved by having one process for downloading that would
> put the names of downloaded packages to a queue and another process
> will unpack and install them.
other (superior) designs exist.

> If you have Intel i5 or better, it will work but if you install to
> Raspberry Pi, it may cause problems due to limited resources.
Again, I think your concerns may be founded upon one particular
design, as opposed to whether fundamental problems exist.

> Moreover, I am not sure whether the same IPC is available for all
> platforms, so such a solution is really difficult and will need a
> lot of testing and debugging.
I have never tried to install texlive on anything but Linux systems,
so I don't know how much commonality there is between
install-tl-unx.tar.gz and the windows version.  If a lot, then that is
a concern, assuming that maintaining the commonality is seen as a good
thing.  Mind you, I would assume that the existence of the given Perl
libraries on all machines of interest would take care of OS-specific
concerns.  (But I say that as someone who avoids programming in Perl.)

Cheers.
                                Jim