TeX Live and linux-aarch64-musl

[Alexander Krumeich]

Hi,

that is a sound and reasonable point. Let's leave it at that and
revisit the issue should the need arise.

   Alexander


On Fri, Jun 4, 2021 at 3:52 PM Johannes Hielscher <jhielscher at posteo.de> wrote:
>
> 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
> >
>