The Arm Linux binaries are incompatible with older systems

[Michal Vlasák]

On Sat Sep 25, 2021 at 9:50 AM CEST, Henri Menke via tex-live wrote:
> On Fri, 2021-09-24 at 16:51 -0600, Karl Berry wrote:
> > 5. In principle, we want to distribute binaries built on the oldest
> > "feasible" system, whatever that might mean in a given case. It comes
> > down to what systems are available to the volunteers who provide the
> > binaries, and how much time they have to finagle all the necessary
> > dependencies.
>
> I don't know what's the situation for musl on ARM, but in principle we
> could just statically link the entire libc for musl builds and
> distribute fully self-contained binaries that way.

While I agree generally, statically linking Lua(TeX), means losing the
support for loading C modules, which requires a dynamic linker. And IIRC
networking (with luasocket in LuaTeX) also depends on dynamic libraries
(NSS) in normal glibc systems -- i.e. the statically linked musl binaries
would not respect the system settings.

I think that the only use of C modules in TeX Live itself is in PGF/TikZ
(although this still must be set up manually by the user?).

But there are users that use modules outside of TeX Live as well. E.g.
https://tug.org/pipermail/luatex/2021-March/007494.html.

Michal Vlasák