TeXlive FreeBSD Port, distfile split-ups and licensing

Kurt Jaeger tex-live at opsec.eu
Sun Apr 9 19:27:59 CEST 2023


Hello,

there's a FreeBSD Port for TeX Live 2021 here:
https://www.freshports.org/print/texlive-full/
and an update to TeX Live 2023 is in preparation.
TeX Live is distributed in several sub-ports, among them:

- devel/tex-kpathsea
- print/texlive-tlmgr
- devel/tex-libtexlua
- devel/tex-libtexluajit
[...]

One problem of those ports is the *huge* distfile. Hosts that build
FreeBSD ports might need to download the full distfile and then,
as the ports are build in parallel, might unpack the whole distfile
multiple times in parallel, which has huuuuge requirements
when it comes to disk-IO and RAM usage.

This can kill even hosts with 128 GB of RAM or more and fast SSDs.

The author of the update to TeX Live 2023 wants to split the
distfile into several sub-distfiles to lessen the load on the
users that build TeX Live from the ports.

This has licensing implications and we need to find some
person that is able to comment on those implications.

Who might be able to help ?

-- 
pi at opsec.eu            +49 171 3101372                    Now what ?


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