[tex-live] Support for OpenBSD

[Mojca Miklavec]

Hi,

I would like to ask if there is any demand for OpenBSD binaries in TL
/ whether we should add the binaries.



Quick summary:

- OpenBSD gets a new release every 6 months.

- Binaries for one release are *incompatible* for the other.

- Two versions are supported at any time (at the moment that's 6.0 and
6.1; 6.1 has been released in April).

- Opinion of some OpenBSD user: one should always use the latest
release. If one doesn't, it's his/her problem. That is: if TL is to
provide support for binaries, it's perfectly OK to support just the
latest release. (Keeping in mind that in October 2017 support for 6.2
should then be added; 6.1 could either be removed then or during the
freeze period in preparation for TL2018.)

- The problem is that OpenBSD currently only supports TL 2015 from the
package manager. TL 2016 is nearly ready, but from what I understand
that means that it will only make it into version 6.2 in October 2017,
so in the best case TL 2017 might make it into 6.3 in April 2018
(maybe I'm wrong though).

- ConTeXt from TL 2015 is basically "useless" which makes TL 2017 more
valuable. We can make a ConTeXt distro ourselves without depending on
TL, but it's still easier if we take all the base binaries from TL.

- Sources can be compiled since a few days ago, but one still needs a
tiny hack to be able to do it, it doesn't work out of the box.

- (The last few points explain why providing TL binaries is somewhat
more important.)

- We have the OpenBSD builds working nearly automatically, so it's not
a questions of whether or not we can/want to provide binaries, but
rather whether or not we need them (I know of at least one user who
would benefit - not me, but in all honesty I don't know how many
potential users we have).


Some other things:

- If we accept the binaries, I would strongly suggest to call them
    {i386|amd64}-openbsd6.1 or
    {i386|amd64}-openbsd61
or something along the lines rather than just "openbsd" to prevent
users of 6.0 or 6.2 accidentally downloading binaries that are broken
for them. Someone would need to introduce a patch to the perl code for
platform name.

- We would probably want/have to add binaries for 6.2 in October.

- I still have issues building wget (the same problems are present on
Mac and Solaris, it's just that wget developers defended workarounds
for these two platforms). The problem should either have to be fixed
or the users could install wget with their package manager, but that's
not really a problem (I've heard that Linux arch users don't get wget
with their distro, so it's not that much different).

Mojca