texlive 2022, and for the binary recommend libwww-perl

[ken@…]

In discussions on the tlbuild list re TL2022-pretest it became apparent that something called 'Net::LWP' should be recomended, both to speed up the downloads (apparently curl provides a lot more overhead), and to reduce the load on the servers suppling the downloads.

I queries this, and it turns out to be libwww-perl (specifically, LWP/UserAgent.pm).

I'll be using that when I get to pretest (it's already installed on this box, but I need to finish beackups and my server update), all beig well it can be recommended for the TL2022 install-tl_unx.

[ken@…]

s/suppling/supplying/

[ken@…]

Confirmed by attaching strace to a running late-pretest install-tl_unx. 'wget' only appears in text of lines read/written from/to documentation files, and in the zwget* references (zwgetfdate, a latex package).

The -persistent-downloads option which is on by default -

"For network installs, activating this option makes the installer try to set up a persistent connection using the C<LWP> Perl module. This opens only one connection between your computer and the server per session and reuses it, instead of initiating a new download for each package, which typically yields a significant speed-up."

Using a reliable pretest site which is 1600km and several countries away, on a slow machine at probably a busy early-evening time, the process took a long time, I dread to think how much longer it would have taken without LWP.

[ken@…]

Changed title since the currency script thinks this is for texlive-20220321.

[ken@…]

Now that browsers are dropping ftp support, it will be better to add html support. From ​https://www.tug.org/historic/ the master system is in France and only supports ftp and rsync. There are mirrors which support https at ​https://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/historic/ (utah), ​https://ftp.tu-chemnitz.de/pub/tug/historic/ (Chemnitz) as well as one or two others including one in China.

Utah usually has good bandwidth and is convenient for North America, Chemnitz may be more convenient for European readers. Unfortunately, for access to the texlive source at a mirror you need to navigate to systems.historic/texlive/2022/.

The source and texmf tarballs are dated 20220321 (as was the contents of hte binary I downloaded), but the tlpdb tarball is dated 20220325.

Source and all except latest asymptote seem fine on an 11.1 system.

[Bruce Dubbs]

We can always host the files on anduin. I know they are large, but we currently have about 35 GB of disk space and can get more if needed.

[ken@…]

Fixed in 396abe07886403559d9850b2d7f0a3989419055c 11.1-427