Call for testing: TeX Collection 2021

Nelson H. F. Beebe beebe at math.utah.edu
Sat Apr 3 15:19:17 CEST 2021


This report summarizes my experience yesterday doing installations of
TeX Live 2021 from the new ISO image that Manfred Lotz announced on
this list.

I reported yesterday that the ISO file, and its two checksums and two
digital signatures, are available in Utah at
 
	http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/texlive-utah-2021/Images/

I have since updated the section on verifying checksums on Microsoft
Windows.  The delay in that update was because it took about 8 hours
to pull down the ISO image over a wireless connection to my home
Windows 10 laptop, whereas the wired systems each downloaded the ISO
file in a few minutes.  

I have Google Fiber service to my home office: the fiber box is less
than a meter from my keyboard where I'm typing this report.  Speed
tests since the fiber installation in late October 2021 consistently
show both upload and download speeds of 600Mb/s to 800Mb/s over wired
connections, a huge improvement over the 5Mb/s up and 200Mb/s down
that I previously had with Comcast cable service that costs US$25 more
per month than Google Fiber ($95 vs $70).

I can now report successful installations of TeX Live 2021 from the
mounted ISO image, texcol2021.iso, on these x86_64 systems:

	CentOS 8 Stream
	ClearLinux
	FreeBSD 12.1
	FreeBSD 13.0-RC4	(official 13.0 expected mid April 2021)
	Microsoft Windows 10
	NetBSD 9.0
	Red Hat 8.0
	Slackware 14.2
	Ubuntu 21.04		(new VM from official 21.04 release of 2-Apr-2021)

There are (as yet) no Solaris 11 executables, but on a newly-updated
Solaris 11.4 system that is covered by an Oracle support contract, I
was able to complete the install by choosing at least one binary
(x86_64-linux).  I then copied over the 2020 bin/x86_64-solaris tree
and tried to set the repository to run updates:

	% tlmgr option repository http://ctan.math.utah.edu/tex-archive/systems/texlive/tlnet
	Can't locate Cwd.pm in @INC (@INC contains: (...long path list...)
	at ,,,/tlmgr line 94.

Next, I tried to run various TeX engines on story.{tex,ltx} files: the
2020 copies of pdftex, tex, latex, pdflatex, and lualatex work, but
then I get

	% xelatex story.ltx
	ld.so.1: xetex: fatal: libc.so.1: version 'ILLUMOS_0.8' not found (required by file /xpool/uumath/texlive/2020/bin/x86_64-solaris211/xetex)
	ld.so.1: xetex: fatal: libc.so.1: open failed: No such file or directory
	Killed

FreeBSD 13 has been under development for about two years, and I have several
VMs built from various 13.0 snapshots.  On all but the most recent, the final
RC4 release candidate, I got behavior like this:

	% tlmgr repository list
	List of repositories (with tags if set):
		http://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet (main)
	ld-elf.so.1: /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.32/mach/CORE/libperl.so.5.32: Undefined symbol "strerror_l at FBSD_1.6"

That led me to create a new FreeBSD 13.0-RC4 VM yesterday and try it,
happily, with success for TL2021.

The normal practice on FreeBSD is that kernels are only updated at
major releases, but packages on development systems are built on
servers with current kernels: consequently, breakage of the "undefined
symbol" type above does sometimes happen after package updates.

The only real fix to the problem is to install a new VM from the
latest ISO image, which has the then-current kernel.  Mostly, this is
not necessary, so I don't worry about such failures.

The official FreeBSD 13.0 release date has slipped several times, but
appears to be about two weeks away, and the successful installation of
TeX Live 2021 on the stable FreeBSD 12.1, and on the nearly final
13.0-RC4, is encouraging.

I note a final issue: the executables in the ISO image are not current
with the TeX Live 2021 source tree:

	121 redhat8:bin % ls -log ./*/tex
	-rwxr-xr-x 1   614168 Mar 15 15:06 ./amd64-freebsd/tex
	-rwxr-xr-x 1  1356832 Mar 15 18:57 ./universal-darwin/tex
	-rwxr-xr-x 1   371060 Mar 15 15:06 ./x86_64-darwinlegacy/tex
	-rwxr-xr-x 1   382488 Mar 14 18:40 ./x86_64-linux/tex

	122 redhat8:bin % ls -log ./*/asy
	-rwxr-xr-x 1   5482504 Mar 16 10:20 ./amd64-freebsd/asy
	-rwxr-xr-x 1  30323312 Mar 16 16:36 ./universal-darwin/asy
	-rwxr-xr-x 1   6807972 Mar 19 15:31 ./x86_64-darwinlegacy/asy
	-rwxr-xr-x 1   4370384 Feb 24 18:22 ./x86_64-linux/asy

A diff between the texlive-20210315 and final texlive-20210325 trees
is 7764 lines long, so we do need more rebuilds and a new ISO image.
I have pulled several new daily snapshots since 25-Mar-2021, but there
were no changes, so I deleted them.

I pulled another one today while writing this message, and found a
164-line diff from 25-Mar-2021, so we don't yet have a stable source
tree.

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- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe at math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe at acm.org  beebe at computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
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