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

[Zdenek Wagner]

2011/4/11 Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists at gmail.com>:
> 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).
>
And clisp for xindy. I try to build the binaries from sources in the
"development stage" not because I really need them but to find and
report possible problems. I have not set up clisp so far so I always
built --without-xindy

>> 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
>
>



-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz