The Arm Linux binaries are incompatible with older systems

[Henri Menke]

On Fri, 2021-09-24 at 16:51 -0600, Karl Berry wrote:
> 1. GNU manuals should not (and usually do not) even require the
> latest
> version of Texinfo, let alone the latest version of TeX.
> 
> 2. In practice, Texinfo does not need (or make use of) any new
> version
> of TeX. I believe any version of TeX going back, oh, a decade or two
> would suffice for most Texinfo manuals.
> 
> 3. Nelson Beebe provides binaries for a great many platforms,
> including
> arm.  I don't know the version. See
>   http://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/texlive-utah-2021/
> the binaries are at
>  
> http://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/texlive-utah-2021/bin/armhf-linux.tar.xz
>  
> http://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/texlive-utah-2021/bin/armv7l-archlinux.tar.xz
> 
> 4. I use CentOS 7 myself. I built the distributed x86-linux binaries
> there for many years. Then ICU, in its wisdom, started requiring new
> "features" of C++ than were supported. I did not want to distribute
> binaries built with my own gcc (I've done it in the past), so had to
> give up. 
> 
> 5. In principle, we want to distribute binaries built on the oldest
> "feasible" system, whatever that might mean in a given case. It comes
> down to what systems are available to the volunteers who provide the
> binaries, and how much time they have to finagle all the necessary
> dependencies.

I don't know what's the situation for musl on ARM, but in principle we
could just statically link the entire libc for musl builds and
distribute fully self-contained binaries that way.

Cheers, Henri

> 6. Building a cut-down set of binaries yourself seems like the best
> approach. I suppose you want to provide pdfs. In which case all you
> need
> is pdftex and the (relatively tiny) support files to build the plain
> format.
> 
> Happy TeXing,
> Karl