TeX Live and pdflatex from source

[Norbert Preining]

Hi Nick,

there have already been good answers from Ken and Karl.
I just want to give a few hints
- compiling from source only gives you the binary artefacts, that is,
  the files in the `bin/ARCH/` directory.
- as Karl said, these need to be merged with the Master tree, or at
  least a minimal version of it
- Karl mentioned copying over your binaries over the ones provided by
  TeX Live, but I don't think this is a good idea, since updates might
  updated the binaries (they might be the very same, but the would not
  be compiled on your system)
- I would suggest to use the "custom binaries" approach to put your own
  your own binaries into bin/custom/ - that way updates using tlmgr will
  still update the files in texmf-dist, but not touch your binaries
- if you want to go full out on building everything in house, you can
  use our scripts in Master/tlpkg/bin to build your own tlnet directory.
  Several people use this for smaller repositories
  (contrib.texlive.info, texjp, ...)


>   3.  Ran the configuration script with a prefix "texlive/configure --prefix=texlive/artifacts"

Please look at the `Build` script, it does a few more setups.

> >From this point I see some of the binaries created in "texlive/artifacts/bin/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu" like "latexmk", "pdftex", and "tlmgr" just to name a few. [I should point out that when I try to run some of these binaries like "tlmgr", I do get the error message of "Can't locate TeXLive/TLConfig.pm in @INC (you may need to install the TeXLive::TLConfig module)"]

This is a consequence of not having merged the binaries with the Master
tree (or a reduced version of it).

> >From this I am trying to understand what the next steps would be. My goal is to get a working version of "pdflatex" built which I think requires getting the pdflatex format files to use with "pdftex". Does this involve getting "tlmgr" to work so I can download the packages from CTAN?

You do not need to go that way. You can go the "old way" and just
compile the binary, put all relevant files (latex.ltx and hundreds more)
into the cwd, and build a format. But this is not really maintainable.

Concerning what Ken wrote:

On Tue, 24 Oct 2023, TeX Live Mailing List wrote:
> and almost every distro appears to end up taking the binaries.  I

Incorrect. As far as I know most distros build the binaries themselves.
Debian does. SuSE does. RH/clones do. ...

Debian has 2023, and packaging is in a publically available git repo.

Best regards

Norbert

--
PREINING Norbert                              https://www.preining.info
Mercari Inc.     +     IFMGA Guide     +     TU Wien     +     TeX Live
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