[tex-live] Stripping LuaTeX with "strip -u -r" to allow loading modules

[Mojca Miklavec]

was: [tex-live] TL2017/LuaTeX "bug" (but also probably in all other
distributions as well)


On 21 April 2017 at 13:35, Patrick Gundlach wrote:
> Hello Karl,
>
>>> and the downside of occupying extra space for the benefit of a
>>> tiny percentage of users.
>>
>> a) I am not sure if this actually increases size of the binary (significantly) First this seems to be a problem on OS X only and I have read some reports that this does not increase the size, depending on the command line arguments given to strip. But I have to investigate further. This comes up on the LuaTeX mailing list once in a while and on the web (tex.stackexchange.com).
>
> the size increase is about 1MB on OS X (just tested here with "strip -u -r" which makes the luatex binary work here). I hope this is not the worth the discussion.

I seem to remember that fully stripping some binaries (was it
wget/xz/asy?) reduces their size for about a factor of ten. Shipping
such unstripped binaries is definitely a no-go. But if we are talking
about 1 MB, I fully support the idea of doing this is an a way that
would let users be more creative when using (Lua)TeX, it's hopefully
just a matter of figuring out how to patch the build scripts to do the
right thing.

It would be interesting to compare the result of the size of the full
set of TL binaries on various platforms:
- without strip
- with "strip -u -r"
- with "strip"
and then decide how exactly to patch. If partial stripping is only
relevant for LuaTeX and increases the size of other binaries for some
significant amount, we could change the patch accordingly. If size
difference is irrelevant and "strip -u -r" works on all platforms, we
could use that everywhere.

It would also be interesting to create some really minimal test that
we use on multiple platforms for checking whether this dynamic loading
of libraries works as expected.

Just my two cents.

(I have no problem taking care of that "manually" for the platforms
I'm building for, but you probably need that for the latest version of
macOS and it would be much nicer to fix this for everyone, not just
for a single platform.)

Mojca