[tex-live] A plea for shared libraries of libkpathsea

[Thomas Esser]

> Please build and include shared libraries of libkpathsea into TeX live.

I strongly recommend against this.

Binaries linked against shared libraries somehow need to be told where
the libraries are unless the library is exactly where the build-time
path specifies. Problems:

  - LD_LIBRARY_PATH env. var is a monster that should be avoided whenever
    possible
  - we want that TeX Live can be installed without superuser privileges,
    so we can't either install the libs at standard places nor modify
    some global file like /etc/ld.so.conf

So, a shared libkpathsea is a "no" for the binaries we want to distribute.
Let alone the problems we get when running from CD.

> $ ldd /usr/bin/ctangle
>         libkpathsea.so.3 => not found

So that's a problem of your debian package, not of TeX Live.

Thomas