TeX Live and linux-aarch64-musl

[Johannes Hielscher]

Hi Alexander,

I second you with the assessment, that the adaption of ARM/AArch64
for open UN*Xoid operating systems will gain momentum in the years
coming (in addition to growth of closed AArch64 OSes like Mac OS and
Windows). That's part of why I had voluneered for TL port of
aarch64-linux (glibc-based) a few years ago.

Porting TL to musl is most probably quite easy, given the fairly modern
and active state of the environment (compilers etc.), as well as some
Linux distros based on musl (Alpine [0] and Void [1] come to my mind)
already have own TL “downstream” binary packages in their regular
repositories.

On the other hand, this also lowers the driving force to supply
aarch64-linuxmusl binaries with “upstream” TeXLive. Unless I overlook
some major use case/scenario of demand for TL binaries, IMHO the
societal layer between those who are fine with the respective distro
binaries, and those who are able/willing to compile TL by themselves
(and link against the libc of their choice) is rather small.

Best,
Johannes

[0]
https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/package/edge/community/aarch64/texlive
[1]
https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/tree/master/srcpkgs/texlive-bin

Am Fri, 4 Jun 2021 10:41:10 +0200
schrieb Alexander Krumeich <alexander.krumeich at gmail.com>:

> Dear TeX Live list,
> 
> it occurred to me that – with the advent of ARM-based Macs – the
> aarch64 platform might gain more traction not only for macOS, but also
> for more varieties of Linux. However, I don't see wide support for
> linux-aarch64-musl today. The currently provided linux-aarch64
> binaries are, as far as I can tell, based on libc. To be clear: I'm
> not talking about darwin-aarch64 running under macOS. That is working
> perfectly now.
> 
> This whole thing might sound like a nerdy edge-case today, but maybe
> in a couple of years we see more demand for that platform. Alpine is
> very popular in the Docker community and in the not too distant future
> people might want to run Alpine-based Docker containers with TeX on
> their ARM Macs (or Raspberry Pi or AWS Graviton or other systems).
> I've successfully shipped a containerized version of TeX Live to
> internal and external clients.
> 
> Full disclosure: I provide the linux-x86_64-musl build of biber that
> is part of TeX Live. I played around with linux-aarch64-musl yesterday
> and managed to build biber successfully in an Alpine-based Docker
> container on my M1 Mac.
> 
> Are there any considerations or plans to support the
> linux-aarch64-musl platform?
> 
>    Alexander
>