[tex-live] TeXLive has no stable source tree and resorts to DVD with binaries?

Mojca Miklavec mojca.miklavec.lists at gmail.com
Mon Apr 11 19:02:02 CEST 2011


Hello,

you probably still didn't explain why you would want to build TeX Live
from source. (There is currently no "./configure, make, make install"
that would get you from source to a working TeX installation. If you
want to build binaries from sources and keep packages up-to-date, you
be almost on your own and you still won't have the latest stable
binaries installed.)

On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 14:47, Kārlis Repsons <karlis.repsons at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sunday 10 April 2011 16:24:29 Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
>> The Build tree is only for developers, not for users.  If someone
>> really wants to compile the binaries himself, he should check out the
>> sources of the latest stable release.
>
> /Short got long, but anyway/
>
> Please explain about what is a stable release here? What svn co?

websvn:
    http://tug.org/svn/texlive/branches/branch2010/
svn co:
    svn://tug.org/texlive/branches/branch2010/

but note that this is just a snapshot of what has been released to
public last year, no bugfixes or updates.

There are two folders. Build contains sources that you need to build.
Master contains the whole installation including all the binaries for
all supported platforms.

That checkout doesn't even contain the package updates that you would
get if you install TeX Live in the usual way. If you take the "trunk",
you get the latest packages in Master, but the Build tree might be
messed up.

> I can do
> checkout, but don't know where else to begin with my basic question: in what
> way should I maintain usable TeXLive installations^, if I want each to be both
> locally compiled from sources and as recent&tested as possible -- for
> production use?

The best possible answer is that you probably have to decide whether
you want to use:
(a) the frozen 2010 release
(b) the 2010 release with package updates
In case (a) you need to install the new release once per year. In case
(b) you can keep running "tlmgr update --all" every now and then.
However in the very unlikely case that a binary would be updated in
TeX Live, the updated binary from the server would overwrite your
self-compiled binary during update.

> ^ since TeXLive can change in many ways, I consider it better to have a folder
> with installations (say 2009, 2010 etc);

This is already the case with the default installation.

> there are still quite many things
> unclear to me, say, what are the external dependencies of TeXLive? (implies
> how soon an old installation might become useless in an up-to-date system)

Debian uses dynamic builds with system libraries like poppler. In that
case they depend on those libraries. TeX Live itself uses statically
built binaries and for those the only dependencies I can think of are
perl, ruby, fontconfig for XeTeX, ... (and maybe some similar ones,
but I cannot think of any at the moment).

> PS:
> I've never tried, so could someone tell me how hard it is to build a whole of
> TeXLive? (I'm on gentoo with all of the development tools and quite a bit of
> experience)

See http://www.tug.org/texlive/build.html. But keep in mind that
following these rules you will only get you the binaries. You will
then need to set up your installation somehow without any existing
auto-magic commands.

Mojca



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