[tex-live] Building texlive 2007 on FreeBSD 7.0 AMD64

[Jonathan Kew]

On 15 Mar 2008, at 2:22 am, Randy Au wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 5:14 PM, Jonathan Kew  
> <jonathan_kew at sil.org> wrote:
>>  On 14 Mar 2008, at 12:38 pm, Michael Krauss wrote:
>>> I am at a loss. What could I try next?
>>
>>  Try setting the TL_MAKE variable:
>
> To report on a bit more on TL+FreeBSD, I tried building texlive on my
> amd64 Freebsd 8.0-CURRENT VM.
>
> After setting TL_MAKE to gmake as needed. I ran ./Build
> --with-fontconfig=/usr/local
>
> for the main svn branch with fresh Build directory, (r6971) the build
> broke partway.
>
> gmake[2]: Entering directory
> `/home/agilis/texlive/Build/source/Work/libs/icu-xetex/common'
> gcc -D_REENTRANT -I../common -I../../../../libs/icu-xetex/common
> -I../../../../libs/icu-xetex/i18n   -DU_COMMON_IMPLEMENTATION -g -O2
> -fvisibility=hidden -c   -o putil.ao
> ../../../../libs/icu-xetex/common/putil.c
> ../../../../libs/icu-xetex/common/putil.c:583:20: error: tzfile.h: No
> such file or directory

This is a portability bug in the ICU library. While the version of  
ICU in TL (for xetex) is slightly patched, none of its build system  
(or this stuff in /common/) has been touched, so the issue comes  
directly from their build. I notice that FreeBSD is listed as a  
"rarely tested" platform (see http://source.icu-project.org/repos/icu/ 
icu/tags/release-3-8-1/readme.html), so occasional breakage may occur.

Anyhow, I have just checked in a patch that I hope will fix this,  
copied from a recent change in ICU trunk; it looks like they have  
corrected this for a future release. Please let me know if it builds  
OK now.

>
> However, the subversion branch "branch2007" seems to have built  
> properly.
>
> [...]
> cd /home/agilis/texlive-branch/branch2007/Build/source/inst/bin/ 
> x86_64-unknown-freebsd8.0
> && strip * >/dev/null 2>&1 || true
>      7725.26 real       848.79 user      1268.27 sys
>
> Copied the binaries into Master/bin and used xelatex to build a file.
>
>
> I'm not too familiar with the texlive dev process, so I'm not sure
> what relationship the branch has with the main trunk right now, but at
> least that branch apparently works on freebsd amd64

The branch contains what was released as TL2007, with only a few  
critical bug-fixes applied since then, whereas trunk has had major  
updates (new versions of many TeX-related programs, and also of 3rd- 
party libs such as ICU, Freetype, and others). So depending how  
widely all these things are tested upstream, it's not surprising if  
we see some build problems when they're all collected into TL and  
built on a wide variety of platforms. In this particular case, it  
looks like an ICU update that hadn't been thoroughly tested on FreeBSD.

What's important now, for TL2008, is to do trial builds in good time,  
so that we can flush out any such problems in time for the release.  
So thanks for reporting this.

Jonathan