texlive 2022 for OpenBSD

Nelson H. F. Beebe beebe at math.utah.edu
Thu Oct 13 18:57:51 CEST 2022


OpenBSD is unusual among modern operating systems in that it does not
guarantee API compability across minor O/S versions: thus, an update
from OpenBSD 7.0 to 7.1 or 7.2 may invalidate most or all locally
built binaries from 7.0.

For that reason, it has never been practical for the TeX Live team to
include binary executables for OpenBSD.

At Utah, I have OpenBSD versions from 4.9 to 7.2, and the developer's
list for OpenBSD is hinting at 7.3.  I normally do builds for only the
last one or two versions of OpenBSD on amd64, although it can be run
on several different CPU types.

In the current OpenBSD 7.2 release, the OpenBSD-supplied
/usr/local/bin/tex executable reports

	TeX 3.141592653 (TeX Live 2021-OpenBSD_Ports)

so it is just a year behind.

I would therefore suggest to Robert Alessi to use the OpenBSD-supplied
TeX installation for now, possibly also installing the TeX Live 2022
tree without any binaries.  That would not permit package updates, but
it would supply somewhat newer package versions than are in the
OpenBSD /usr/local tree.  It might, however, requiring fiddling with
search paths in the numerous TeX Live environment variables.

Robert is welcome to contact me in early 2023 when the TeX Live build
season starts in earnest.  I may be able to do builds then on 7.0,
7.1, 7.2, and 7.3 on amd64.  I have the QEMU technology needed to
support other CPUs, so I might consider one or more of them as well.


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- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                                                          -
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- 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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