[OS X TeX] Testing Hardened Runtime in Basic TeX

[Richard Koch]

Murray,

Thanks for this test, and even more for the detailed report.

The line that stands out to me is that you use biber. Biber is not in BasicTeX and thus was not in this BasicTeX-Hardened package. I suppose you got it from one of the extra packages you installed. Do you know which one has it?

The reason this is interesting is that biber is a special case. When TeX Live is compiled, the builders to not compile biber. Instead its authors provide pre-compiled binaries which are inserted into TeX Live. When I had to adopt hardened runtimes for the various binary programs in TeX, the one program that did not work was biber. I notified the authors and they are working on that problem. At last report they had made progress, but still did not have a version which could adopt a hardened runtime and yet work correctly.

The binaries that were added by the packages you added do NOT have hardened runtimes. But we have also tested the full MacTeX, and it is known that biber is the only case of a TeX binary which cannot currently be hardened. 

The key unknown is whether any of the remaining binaries require "exceptions" to run correctly.

Dick Koch

> On May 21, 2019, at 12:29 PM, Murray Eisenberg <murrayeisenberg at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Report on first using BasicTeX-2019-Hardened (the first BasicTeX of any variety that I’ve used) rather than the TeXLive-2019 that had been installed as part of MacTeX-2019:
> 
> (0) Environment:  macOS Mojave 10.14.5 with TeXShop 4.27
> 
> (1) For my book-length document, I had to manually install the following packages not included in BasicTeX, which I list in the order they were encountered in the dozen-file preamble and the root document:
> 
> 	snapshot
> 	ifetex
> 	csquotes
> 	moresize
> 	enumitem
> 	xstring
> 	xpatch
> 	suffix.sty [in bigfoot !]
> 	pict2e
> 	tikz-cd
> 	lipsum
> 	cyrillic
> 	scalerel
> 	thmtools !!
> 	biblatex !!
> 	logreq
> 	nomencl
> 	epeatindex
> 	xurl
> 	xmpincl
> 	hyperxmp
> 	doclicense
> 	xifthen
> 	xassoccnt
> 	cleveref !!
> 	showlabels
> 	fixme
> 	ccicons
> 
> 	Surprises or issues re packages:
> 
> 		(a)  BasicTeX does not include thmtools, biblatex, or cleveref. 
> 
> 		(b) I had to search in my existing TeXLive-2019 (but could have searched instead at CTAN) for suffix.sty (in the bigfoot package) and the the first Cyrillic-related missing file, namely, ot2end.sty (and presumably installing the cyrillic package took care of other files that might otherwise have been missing).
> 
> (2) Runs from within TeXShop of the latex (i.e., pdflatex) engine and then the pdflatexmk engine, with biber as the bibliography tool, and with the engine’s calls to makeindex, went just fine on my 613-page document.
> 
> (3) Comment: When doing the switch, I really appreciated having the alias /Library/TeX/texbin, so that no changes to path settings were needed in the TeXShop preferences!
> 
> 
>> On 17 May2019, at 5:38 PM, Richard Koch <koch at uoregon.edu> wrote:
>> 
>> Folks,
>> 
>> I'm hoping to recruit MacTeX users, particularly those running BasicTeX, to test a new distribution which will replace the current one this fall. This task should be easy:
>> 
>> a) Download the following install package, which has size 105 MB
>> 
>> 	https://pages.uoregon.edu/koch/BasicTeX-2019-Hardened.pkg
>> 
>> 2) Install the package. It will not overwrite BasicTeX-2019 or MacTeX-2019, and it should behave just like BasicTeX-2019
>> 
>> 3) Typeset your standard projects. If you run into difficulty, switch to your copy of BasicTeX-2019 and try again. If BasicTeX-2019 works but BasicTeX-2019-Hardened fails, write me and we will try to diagnose the problem.
>> 
>> I already tried pdflatex, xelatex, and lualatex on a 120 page document. All three worked fine.
>> 
>> Feel free to use TeX Live Utility to upgrade BasicTeX-2019 and BasicTeX-2019-Hardened during the test. This is not entirely optimal, since if any actual binaries are updated, then the hardened originals will be replace by ordinary new copies. But we seldom update actual binaries during the year.
>> 
> 
> ---
> Murray Eisenberg			murrayeisenberg at gmail.com
> 503 King Farm Blvd #101	Home (240)-246-7240
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> 
> 
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