On Sun, Dec 07, 2014 at 09:18:26PM +0100, Armin K. wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have some Texlive observations and questions that I encountered when I
> built texlive pass1 from source using BLFS instructions.
>
> First, couple of questions, mainly for Ken - I apologize if this has
> been answered somewhere, I wasn't following the large Texlive thread
> that happened not so long ago:
>
> Why is '/opt/texlive/2014' used as a prefix? Why not simply
> /opt/texlive, or if year is a must, /opt/texlive2014?
>
> Why is '--bindir=/opt/texlive/2014/bin/$TEXARCH' specified? Why is it
> needed to specifiy an architecture there? For compatibility with binary
> installer which iirc does the same? Or is there something else that
> requires it to be like this?
>
Both are for compatability with the binary installer. Given how
hard it was for you to get texmf at a reasonable speed, I guess that
the binary option is not going to go away any time soon.
Over the past few months I have been working on my test scripts to
prove that various parts of TeX are working (or not), and then
trying to make them distro-agnostic (they even work on FreeBSD-10.1
if bash has been installed, and for me getting binary texlive, xorg,
xfce *did* install bash). I realised that the recommended location
for the binary is in /usr/local (I think it was
/usr/local/texlive/yyyy which is sort-of outside FHS), but BLFS has
used /opt/texlive/yyyy since I ever paid any attention to this [
insert word of your choice here ] package.
The binary uses the year so that its updater (tlmgr, I think) can
work. It seems that at one time you could do a binary update from
the old year to the new year, but I suspect that is no longer
allowed.
> Why is the following command used tar -xf texlive-20140525-texmf.tar.xz
> -C /opt/texlive/2014 --strip-components=1 ? The current directory should
> be: "${SOURCEDIR}/texlive-20150525-source/build", which would make this
> command invalid iirc. I suppose it needs ../../ before the tarball name
> if we are to follow the conventions used elsewhere.
>
I _thought_ I added a note to say that you should NOT untar this
package at the start (because of the waste of space).
> Now couple of observations:
>
> libpaper is listed as a recommended dep, yet no --with-system-libpaper
> switch is present like for other recommended packages. Intentional or
> nothing in this pass uses it?
It is used by at least lualatex and xelatex, ISTR that the system
version is found automatically.
>
> For the optional dependencies, there's a sentence that says "The source
> ships with its own versions of several libraries which are either not
> under active development, or only used for limited functionality." with
> libgd listed there. I don't think it's inactive as the most recent
> version is from last year and it can also be used by PHP instead of its
> bundled one. Latest t1lib is indeed a bit rusty, but it can be used at
> least by evince and maybe one or two moe packages.
>
> The following text is written above the texmf tarball: "Because of the
> size of this package, it is unlikely to be mirrored by BLFS mirrors. In
> case of difficulty, go to http://www.ctan.org/mirrors/ to find a
> more-accessible mirror." The URL is written as plain text. It would be
> nice if it was "clickable".
I'll try to remember that - I'm up to my **** (the Americans use a
word meaning 'donkey', we Britons use a different word ;) in
alligators¹ at the moment, all of them related to texlive.
>
> Alternatively, you may have seen my mail @ blfs-support mailing list. No
> mirror listed on that page contains the texmf tarball as-is or I have
> been unable to find it. If it's indeed there, a small clarification
> about the path to it could be useful.
Saw it, replied, noted that I've been downloading texmf and source
from previous years without difficulty (but building gets
increasingly different as you go backwards to older releases) -
unfortunately, I could not get the binary versions they provide to
run, even after moving things to get the symlinks to be satisfied -
ISTR that the texmf-var/ (or a name like that) directory was
missing.
>
> The texmf tarball contains a lot of documentation which may not be
> useful to some (including myself) that takes _a lot_ of space (~1.4-1.6
> GB). Since not everybody would want to install the documentation since
> it takes that much space and it's available online, I suppose the
> following command could be used to prevent "doc" (and "sources")
> directories to be installed, saving at least ~1.6 GB of space. The fonts
> directory takes a lot of space too. Some fonts may be ommited, but I am
> not sure which ones. Anyways, the command I used to ommit source and
> documentation extraction was: tar --exclude=*/texmf-dist/doc
> --exclude=*/texmf-dist/source --strip-components=1 -xf
> texlive-20140525-texmf.tar.xz ...
Reducing it would be nice, but there are so many different
use-cases. Traditional TeX defaults to the ugly old fonts (sorry,
Knuth, I don't like them) but many people use them. Some of it is
for pre-UTF-8 use of non-N.W.European languages (e.g. one of the
documented libraries). I see that Arch split it many ways, but I
have no guidance to offer. Other distros also split it, probably in
different ways. My own usage tests assume that everything might be
there. Certainly, _some_ of the OTF/TTF fonts are useful in current
lualatex and xelatex.
Also, with a full install 'texdoc' works, at least for those items
where there is a PDF, man, or info page.
>
> Last, but not the least. I have an issue. I went and installed it into
> /usr, but can't get some kind of catalog to generate itself, this the
> entire install becomes useless. The following output is from pdflatex:
>
>
> This is pdfTeX, Version 3.14159265-2.6-1.40.15 (TeX Live 2014 - BLFS)
> (preloaded format=pdflatex)
> restricted \write18 enabled.
>
> kpathsea: Running mktexfmt pdflatex.fmt
> /usr/bin/mktexfmt: line 398: //texmf-dist/texconfig/tcfmgr: No such file
> or directory
> fmtutil: config file `fmtutil.cnf' not found.
> I can't find the format file `pdflatex.fmt'!
>
LOL (in sympathy) - I spent hours last night fighting fmtutil.cnf
problems when trying to build older versions where texlinks was just
a script in the utils/web2c/tetex/ directory. Most of this stuff is
non-intuitive.
> The //texmf-dist is what's reported by kpsewhich -var-value TEXMFDIST
> which should be /usr/share/texmf-dist. The build script I used is
> available at:
>
> https://raw.githubusercontent.com/elkrejzi/system-management/master/buildscripts/buildtexlive
>
> kpsewhich appears to be looking in /usr/share/texmf-dist/web2c/texmf.cnf
> for details, but there's only a reference to
>
> TEXMFROOT = $SELFAUTOPARENT
> TEXMFDIST = $TEXMFROOT/texmf-dist
>
> However, I have no idea where SELFAUTOPARENT is being set and what it is
> being set to.
>
> Cheers.
>
I think you have fixed that, so I will not comment (in any case, I
had no idea how to fix it). For me, the advantage of building in
/opt is that it is comparatively easy to move one version out of the
way and try a different version (or a different configuration).
If you are tempted by either of xindy or asymptote, xindy seems to
be fine on x86_64, but does not work in i686 on LFS/BLFS from late
November - I do not know if the from-source version worked on i686
for 7.6 - and asymptote is currently broken (it falls apart during
'make install' while creating the docs : fortunately, the asy
program has been installed by that stage, and works).
Increasingly, I wish I had never touched this heep of foetid dingo's
kidneys.
[1] A phrase used by "Edmund Heep" in the Posy Simmonds cartoons in
the Guardian (a UK newspaper) in years now long gone.
ĸen
--
Nanny Ogg usually went to bed early. After all, she was an old lady.
Sometimes she went to bed as early as 6 a.m.
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