[tex-live] persistent connections when downloading

[Norbert Preining]

Dear all,

I committed some changes to the repository that will hopefully make
the often experienced download breakage disappear. The problem was
that we called wget for each and every file, which means that for
each and every file a new connection was made. This seems to be
a problem for many servers.

So from tomorrow on: tlmgr in tlcritical, and intall-tl in all packages
will have an additional command line switch
	--persistent-downloads
which tries to set up only one connection to the server and re-uses
it during the whole run.

This is done by using the Perl modules 
	LWP
(Debian: libwww-perl, other distributions something similar, they are
pretty standard).

So Unix users can use that out of the box. Windows users unfortunately
have to wait as we do NOT ship the LWP modules by now.

For everyone it is save to give this option, as if the LWP modules are
not present both programs will fall back to wget mode as before.

If you can please test this new access mode as we want to make it the
default (after having switched Windows to a newer perl, too) and report
any experiences, problems, etc here.

Thanks

Norbert

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Norbert Preining            preining@{jaist.ac.jp, logic.at, debian.org}
JAIST, Japan            TU Wien, Austria           Debian TeX Task Force
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