texlive 2022 for OpenBSD

[Robert Alessi]

Hi Nelson,

On Thu, Oct 13, 2022 at 10:57:51AM -0600, Nelson H. F. Beebe wrote:
> 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.

I have read this on texlive-utah, but didn't make the connection to
the difficulty of including the binaries in texlive once a year for a
distribution that is upgraded twice a year.  Everything is now
perfectly clear to me.

> 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.

So you already have the binaries for the upcoming OpenBSD 7.2?  Are
these published at texlive-utah?  As I am only at the very beginning
of my investigations, I went to look for the binaries only here:
https://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/texlive-utah/bin/

(By the way, the file corresponding to OpenBSD 7.0 here is only 2.5Mb,
compared to about 32-40Mb for all other files, and I was unable to
extract it on my system.)

> 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.

Thank you for this idea that I did not have in mind when asking for
help.  However, I would like to point out that it is precisely the
need to always work with an up-to-date distribution of texlive,
especially with latex-dev, that drove me to ask for help.

Yet another way would be to use e.g. Debian with QEMU, but this is not
a very flexible solution and I would rather use it as a last resort.

> 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.

Thank you so much for this, I will definitely contact you as soon as
the preparation of texlive 2023 has begun.  As far as I am concerned,
only the amd64 binaries will be needed.

With kind regards,

Robert

-- 
Robert Alessi
CNRS UMR 8167 «Orient & Méditerranée» (Paris)