[tex-live] TeX Live & FreeBDS

[Karl Berry]

    > FreeBSD have very good ABI compatibility support. 

My recollection is that I was told that the version of every shared
library was changed in every (minor) release, e.g., from version 20 to
version 21.  So that distributing a binary that works on version X.Y is
useless, because it will not run on X.Y+1, or X.Y-1, let alone anything
more distant.

Now that I write this, I'm not actually sure if I was told about
FreeBSD, OpenBSD, or NetBSD, or some subset of those.

Are you telling me now that is incorrect for FreeBSD?

Anyway, although we won't be adding FreeBSD (or any other new) binaries
to the DVD, Scott Friedemann (he's on this list, and tlbuild) has built
them and kindly volunteered to maintain them going forward.  They'll be
available over the Internet after the release.  If anyone wants to try
them now, I put them at ftp://tug.org/historic/systems/texlive/2009
(file i386-freebsd.tar.gz, the only thing there at the moment).

karl