[Announcement] TeX Live 2011: Extended FreeBSD support

[C-S]

On Sat, 2011-07-23 at 12:00 +0000, freebsd-ports-request at freebsd.org
wrote:
> Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2011 20:35:16 +0200
> From: Nikola Le?i? <nikola.lecic at anthesphoria.net>
> Subject: [Announcement] TeX Live 2011: Extended FreeBSD support
> To: freebsd-ports at freebsd.org
> Message-ID: <201107221551.p6MFpB1T014394 at anthesphoria.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
> 
> 
> Dear FreeBSD community,
> 
> Yesterday, Karl Berry announced the release of TeX Live 2011:
> 
>   http://tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/2011-July/029711.html
> 
> For those of you who use the official distribution, we arranged
> everything so that TeX Live 2011 should work on FreeBSD 7, 8 and 9
> (i386 and amd64) out of the box.
> 
> However, there are some special cases; like the previous year I
> prepared the "Extended FreeBSD support" page:
> 
>   http://anthesphoria.net/FreeBSD/TeXLive-2011/bin/
> 
> These special cases include FreeBSD 8 and 9 users who need
> applications
> such as asy and xindy, and users of older FreeBSD releases (5 and 6).
> Please refer to README.txt for the detailed info.
> 
> A special note for users of biblatex: FreeBSD binaries of the
> next-generation biblatex backend, biber, are included in TeX Live
> 2011.
> An additional support for biblatex-biber users on older FreeBSD
> releases
> is available as well:
> 
>   http://anthesphoria.net/FreeBSD/Biber/
> 
> Since biber is a Perl script that relies on many newer-than-ported and
> not-yet-ported Perl modules, this is currently the only easy way to
> run
> biber on FreeBSD. 


First of all, this is great news.
My question is: what is the reason for not creating a port given that
you claim in your README.txt file that these binaries have been built in
jails with minimal dependencies. This means that you have figured out
what these dependencies are. Hence, I'd appreciate it a lot if you could
help us create a working port of texlive.

Carlo