TeX Live and linux-aarch64-musl

[Alexander Krumeich]

Dear TeX Live list,

it occurred to me that – with the advent of ARM-based Macs – the
aarch64 platform might gain more traction not only for macOS, but also
for more varieties of Linux. However, I don't see wide support for
linux-aarch64-musl today. The currently provided linux-aarch64
binaries are, as far as I can tell, based on libc. To be clear: I'm
not talking about darwin-aarch64 running under macOS. That is working
perfectly now.

This whole thing might sound like a nerdy edge-case today, but maybe
in a couple of years we see more demand for that platform. Alpine is
very popular in the Docker community and in the not too distant future
people might want to run Alpine-based Docker containers with TeX on
their ARM Macs (or Raspberry Pi or AWS Graviton or other systems).
I've successfully shipped a containerized version of TeX Live to
internal and external clients.

Full disclosure: I provide the linux-x86_64-musl build of biber that
is part of TeX Live. I played around with linux-aarch64-musl yesterday
and managed to build biber successfully in an Alpine-based Docker
container on my M1 Mac.

Are there any considerations or plans to support the
linux-aarch64-musl platform?

   Alexander