TeXLive merge into FreeBSD ports tree - is this going to happen or not?

[Nikola Lečić]

On Sat, 26 May 2012 13:05:26 -0500, Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote:
> Do you have instructions for how to build customized texlive
> binaries? Then we could create a port that creates
> amd64-freebsd-tl2011.tar.xz or i386-freebsd-tl2011.tar.xz.

All the work I mentioned is integrated into the TeX Live source tree,
except for the two binaries, biber and xindy. Currently it is not
possible to build biber within FreeBSD ports (see below). I'd recommend
a separate port for xindy (see below). Therefore, just build the TeX
Live source with --disable-xindy. You don't need --disable-biber (see
below why).

Besides obvious dependencies, such a wrapper port should include a
dependency on x11-toolkits/p5-Tk, to enable install-tl/tlmgr GUI.

As for biber and xindy:

biber:

biber is built with a huge number of not-yet-ported and
newer-than-ported brand new perl modules. Then they are packed with
PAR::Packer into a huge ~15M binary. Therefore it's currently not
possible to build biber within FreeBSD ports. Please note that compiling
TeX Live source *will* install a biber binary, however this binary is
not built, it's simply a copy of the binary that I provide through the
CTAN biber distribution. 

The wrapper port could do the same, i.e. use the binaries from the
CTAN, through TeX Live build. Please take a look:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/biblatex-biber/files/biblatex-biber/0.9.9/binaries/FreeBSD/

The binaries without FreeBSD release number run are portable, and run
on __FreeBSD_version>=701000. Biber is important because it is going to
replace BibTeX as biblatex backend at some point in the future.

(If you are anyway interested in what is needed to create biber
binaries without ports, let me know.)

xindy:

I have clisp built with --with-ffcall --without-readline --disable-nls.
However, this is not enough and the resulting binary is not portable.
Therefore, it would be better to create a normal port for xindy.

-- 
Nikola Lečić = Никола Лечић
fingerprint : FEF3 66AF C90E EDC3 D878  7CDC 956D F4AB A377 1C9B
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