Vanilla TeX Live 2020 - install-tl -gui - automatic platform detection fails when Live System with i386-linux-binaries is running on an x86_64-machine.

[Norbert Preining]

Hi Ulrich,

that is indeed a tricky combination. TeX Live doesn't use dpkg to
determine the architecture but the config.guess tool from the autoconf
family.

The "problem" (not really a problem though) is that Debian has
multi-arch support, so you can run i386 and amd64 binaries side by side.
This is in fact a good thing (at least for those of use running Steam and
Wine ;-) but in this case it creates complication, because the *natural*
architecture is not used but one that is also supported.

I don't see any easy way to catch these things, but one thing comes to
my mind: we *could* check what kind of binary the Perl interpreter that
runs the installer actually is with
	use Config;
	if ($Config{longsize} == 4) {
	  # this is a 32bit perl that might run on 64bit arch
	} elsif ($Config{longsize} == 8) {
	  # this is a 64bit perl (and thus on 64bit arch)
	} else {
	  # give me a break
	}
By this we **could** override the detection of the hardware architecture
with the actual OS type running.

This is NOT perfect, becasue one **could** in principle on Debian amd64
system install a 32bit perl .... but well, those who do this are on
their own ;-)

>     xetex can't find shared library libfontconfig.so.1
>     xelatex can't find shared library libfontconfig.so.1
> 
> I was puzzled at first because
> 
>     $ sudo apt-get install libfontconfig1
> 
> yielded the following message:
> 
>     libfontconfig1 is already the latest version (2.13.1-2).

Despite all the above, you could simply add amd64 as architecture to
Debian, and then install libfontconfig1:amd64
	dpkg --add-architecture amd64
	apt-get update
	apt-get install libfontconfig1:amd64

All the best

Norbert

--
PREINING Norbert                              https://www.preining.info
Accelia Inc. + IFMGA ProGuide + TU Wien + JAIST + TeX Live + Debian Dev
GPG: 0x860CDC13   fp: F7D8 A928 26E3 16A1 9FA0 ACF0 6CAC A448 860C DC13