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Why texlive use perltk to make the installer? I use texlive since 2007. At this time there was only perltk as a really Platform indecency tool for GUI. But nowadays there are tool like Qt with Qt-Installer or InstallAnywhere to make installer.

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  • texlive is maintained by volunteers, contributions probably welcome. By the way: What would be the benefit of Qt?
    – Keks Dose
    Jun 11, 2016 at 16:17
  • Perl is on every Unix box, Qt isn't. PerlTk has small impact and is very easily installed, Qt requires proper linking and API calls. Using Qt or other library needs extensive work that doesn't seem so necessary for the rather elementary graphic interface of tlmgr or the installer. This said, you might look at TeX Live Utility for Mac OS X and get ideas about implementing a proper interface for other platforms.
    – egreg
    Jun 11, 2016 at 16:57
  • I don't mean the <s>Qt Library</s>, I mean the tool Qt Installer, which generates an Installer and Package manager, which can run without the library. According to the document, it can generate installer for Linux, Windows, and Mac. @KeksDose For "normal" User, the installer looks like a native Install process on his operating system.
    – lazyboy
    Jun 11, 2016 at 18:31
  • How many people actually use the perltk installer? Is this the Windows installer? If so, I guess a reasonable number. Presumably very few on other platforms. Most OS X users will use MacTeX. Most other Unix-ish users will either use the command line, which is recommended by upstream, or rely on distro packages, which don't use the TL installer at all.
    – cfr
    Jun 11, 2016 at 22:59
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    I seriously doubt that the result of the proposed process would look like a native install process on my system. There is simply nothing for such a process to look like. The only platforms this has any meaning on are Windows and OS X and the latter already has a native installer for TL. The idea of a Platform indecency tool is genuinely intriguing, though I'm not sure I really want to know.
    – cfr
    Jun 11, 2016 at 23:01

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My answer is two-fold, depending on how you mean to use Qt (or any other poratble toolkit):

  • if you want to use qt installer - this does not work as most installer routines are written in perl and converting them to qt installer would be a big procedure. I don't say it is impossible, but it needs work
  • if you want to use the Qt Toolkit, that is perl/qt, then I am already working on something like this, but I don't have much experience in Qt programming nor GUI layout, so if a GUI designer and/or Qt master wants to help, please contact me.

Hope the clarifies your questions

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  • I'm not a Qt Master I just have some knowledge about it during my time in Uni, but want to port the install in Qt, can I try it?
    – lazyboy
    Jun 12, 2016 at 9:35
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    As I said, you cannot put the install itself to Qt, only the GUI asking for what to install. After that we need to return to Perl.
    – norbert
    Jun 12, 2016 at 9:57
  • Contact me per email if you are interested, and we can discuss the further procedure. We (the TeX Live Team) would be happy to see activity in this direction!
    – norbert
    Jun 12, 2016 at 10:06

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