[tex-live] Build binaries with static libraries

[Mojca Miklavec]

On 30 March 2017 at 01:24, Karl Berry wrote:
>
> readline and ncurses are fundamental libraries. Arch surely provides
> them? If Arch chooses to break every existing binary by bumping the
> version number (if that's what happened), we can't help that. Maybe they
> provide their own asy, at least.

They most likely provide the latest version of everything. Providing
binaries without any external dependencies like TeX Live does is
rather an exception than the rule. The whole GNU Linux ecosystem works
on the basis of packaging OpenSource software inside the distro, so I
doubt they are actually breaking anything by providing the latest
version of libraries. All packages are built from sources (or perhaps
on the build servers, not sure), so for whatever package the distro
provides, this is not an issue.

> Regarding asy, the author tells us that readline and GL are important
> parts of the functionality, so we don't want to remove them, and it's
> impractical to compile all of X (which is what it would amount to).
> Most of the other deps are induced from GL.

Karl, the only two "problematic" libraries for Vladimir were
"readline" and "ncurses", X apparently works. Something similar is
true for Solaris and Mac.

At least readline is problematic for me for basically all the
platforms where I have to compile asymptote (Mac, Solaris) and now we
figured out that it's also a problem on Linux (I don't know how
windows binaries are compiled, but I'm sure that one needs a copy of
the library there as well).

Readline is pretty lightweight. Compiling the whole of X11 would
clearly be an overkill, but adding a small set of additional libraries
to be statically linked in asy would help in my opinion.

Mojca