[tlbuild] Best place to document the building procedure

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 10:41 PM, Karl Berry wrote:
>     What is the best place to document these kind of things (assuming
>     there would be roughly 2 pages of text)?
>
> For that much info, I think Build/source/doc/README.solaris with a
> pointer in Build/source/README.

OK.

> Oddly, in that period when I was doing the build, I don't remember doing
> anything special except having to specify the compiler.

There is no need to do anything special as long as:
- one is using older "update/patchlevel" of the OS on the build
machine than on the target machine
- one doesn't have additional/nonstandard libraries installed on the
build machine

But that's the same issue on almost every other OS. Last year I had to
make some extra precautions because I was using the latest version of
Solaris 10 with a lot of extra libraries installed: wget would happily
link against anything that happened to be installed on the machine and
xz would use the latest version of libc even though it could happily
live with an older one.

The only reason for such a file would be documenting how to compile
the sources in a portable way, so that they would work properly on
outdated machines.

> On another front, though, I wonder if anyone is actually using the TL
> sparc-solaris binaries.  As far as I know, Nelson builds his own (with
> concomitant pain) -- don't you, Nelson?

Just curious: what is the reason for compiling his own binaries? Just
because he loves the challenge or are there other reasons?

> I haven't heard of anyone else
> still using that platform in recent years.  So maybe it's also a
> candidate for being dropped now.

That's up to you. I see no reason for shipping the binaries on DVD,
but as long as the binaries compile almost out-of-the-box, there is
not so much extra burden keeping them online.

(I doubt that one could use the default system compiler for compiling
TeX Live, but gcc 4.9 did the job, so it's probably not worth spending
any effort trying to make the sources work with the default compiler.)

There must be sufficient demand for TeX on Solaris (if nothing else
because software documentation requires texinfo) that they included
TeX Live in the package manager:
    http://www.opencsw.org/packages/texlive/
even though they are still shipping version 2012.

Mojca