texlive installation aborted after hours of installation; restarting without duplication

I solved this problem by installing not full scheme, but small. After that I installed necessary packages by hand. tlmgr gui works fine for that.

In case of problems redownload should start with a smaller set of packages, not every one (but in fact there were no problems).

I also wrote to TeXLive mailing list about the problem with redownloading everything. They proposed the following (thanks to Philip Taylor) (UPD):

  1. Download TeXLive repository to your local directory with rsync, which is incremental (it doesn't redownload present files)

    rsync -a --delete rsync://somectan/somepath/systems/texlive/tlnet/ /your/local/dir

  2. Install from local repository,

    ./install-tl -repository /your/local/dir


What follows is my answer on the TeX Live mailing list:

We are well aware, and we had in former times a mechanism that kept the downloaded packages around and re-used them for installation, so that no double download happened.

Then, lots of people complained that during an installation of scheme-full the disk usage exploded to about 6+ Gb (due to full installation plus one set of all packages).

Thus, for now we delete the packages.

Furthermore, continuing an aborted installation by reading the already installed packages and only install the rest: This is not possible at the moment, and I am not sure how to guarantee that all files of all the hitherto installed packages are actually installed.

Package managers like dpkg (on Debian) hit hard on the hard disk by syncing files permanently to guarantee consistency. I am not sure if we want to do something like this for install-tl.

What might be possible is the following: If install-tl breaks down and writes a profile, then it already knows that the installed packages are fine, and writes a hint into the profile, so that a restart of the installation can continue from there. I will look into it.

Last but not least, on sx you wrote

I have no idea how to implement the crypic instruction

    `install-tl --profile installation.profile [EXTRA-ARGS]`

well, the EXTRA-ARGS are those arguments you passed in to install-tl on the original installation, like --repository or something else... In most cases not necessary. So in most of the cases you simply do

install-tl --profile installation.profile

as is.

Hope that helps


Just try

sudo install-tl --profile installation.profile

on the command line. Maybe you hit a mirror which wasn't fully synced.