freebsd-texlive special port is for which archs?

[Antonio Olivares]

Dear Romain,

I have a question. On FreeBSD list there are several folks which
still use the depracated TeTeX present on FreeBSD because texlive is
unsupported on thier platforms(archs). One such user uses IA64 and
there is no texlive binary for it. If this user installs
freebsd-texlive ports, then will he be able to use texlive on IA64. I
was going to recommend him to get freebsd-texlive on his system, but I
am unsure that it will work because there are no binaries for IA64
only 32 bit and x86_64. I want to convince him to try it out, but he
will have to get rid of TeTeX and start over which I am unsure that he
wants to go that route. In any case, it is just something that if not
him other users would like to use texlive on unsupported platforms.

BTW,
In another message you refer to update texlive port to texlive 2012.
The port is not that far off from the real distribution. I was going
to ask if I have the 2012 texlive DVD, can I copy the source xz file
so I won't have to download it to update the port? I am now on
limited bandwidth and I will have to be carefull not to pass the set
limit :( The makefile(s) then will process the update and make the
needed changes. Is that a valid conclusion?

Regards,


Antonio

[Romain Tartière]

Hello Antonio,

On Wed, Aug 01, 2012 at 09:12:26AM -0500, Antonio Olivares wrote:
> I have a question. On FreeBSD list there are several folks which
> still use the depracated TeTeX present on FreeBSD because texlive is
> unsupported on thier platforms(archs). One such user uses IA64 and
> there is no texlive binary for it. If this user installs
> freebsd-texlive ports, then will he be able to use texlive on IA64. I
> was going to recommend him to get freebsd-texlive on his system, but I
> am unsure that it will work because there are no binaries for IA64
> only 32 bit and x86_64. I want to convince him to try it out, but he
> will have to get rid of TeTeX and start over which I am unsure that he
> wants to go that route. In any case, it is just something that if not
> him other users would like to use texlive on unsupported platforms.

The freebsd-texlive ports do not use the several binary packages shipped
with TeXLive, but rather compiles them using the huge source tarball
released once a year. So this user will hopefully be able to build IA64
binaries by compiling print/texlive-core. And more generally, it should
be possible to compile for any architecture as far as the source code of
the binaries is portable.

Please note however that I only have amd64 machines so maybe some fixes
may be required (e.g. some platforms are strict regarding data
structure fields alignment, which are incompatible with some compiler
settings. I don't know however if such a situation is present in
TeXLive or not. Well designed code should not trigger this kind of
errors though).

> BTW,
> In another message you refer to update texlive port to texlive 2012.
> The port is not that far off from the real distribution. I was going
> to ask if I have the 2012 texlive DVD, can I copy the source xz file
> so I won't have to download it to update the port? I am now on
> limited bandwidth and I will have to be carefull not to pass the set
> limit :( The makefile(s) then will process the update and make the
> needed changes. Is that a valid conclusion?

The cooked TeXLive 2012 port seems to build quite well:
http://redports.org/buildarchive/20120801120402-16530/

I will commit it in the freebsd-texlive repo tomorrow unless I see some
major issue (the 10-CURRENT build is in progress at the time of sending
this e-mail and I am about to leave). I will then have to make minor
changes [*] to the set of tools used to update the texlive-* ports and
will then setup the system to update them on a daily basis. These
updates will use the current version of the distfiles available on the
mirrors. For most ports, it is likely that the "current" version will
be the same as the one on the DVD, do you definitively will be able to
copy the .xz files from the DVD to your
/var/cache/portshaker/ports/distfiles/TeXLive/ directory. Then the port
system will only downloads files that have been updated since the DVD
was made.

[*] these changes will make it easier to switch from the upstream FTP
servers with unversioned filenames to a mirror with versionned
filenames. The problem of the bandwidth you are talking about and the
possibility of getting the files from a DVD is quite tricky. I'll try
to keep it into account and if possible provide an elegant solution for
this.

Regards,
Romain