I am currently looking for ways to minimise the size of my texLive installation. My question generally concerns all operating systems, but for now it would suffice for me to know this in the context of Windows: Can I safely delete the tlperl folder and still compile documents or is it somehow involved in the compilation process?
1 Answer
No, please don't delete it! Many scripts in TeX Live, foremost the important scripts fmtutil and updmap are written in Perl and require tlperl. In case you delete the folder you will be able to run already built formats, but anything else (like updates, missing formats, ...) Will not work.
glossaries
package. Also, it might be that TeXLive itself needs Perl for housekeeping tasks; I don't know for certain. If you want to save space, just delete Windows instead ;-)