[tlbuild] TeX Live build failure: xindy requires latex already installed

[Ed Avis]

I downloaded 
<ftp://tug.org/texlive/historic/2008/texlive-20080816-source.tar.lzma> 
and tried to build it with './configure --prefix=$HOME' but 
configuration failed with the error:

=== configuring in utils/xindy 
(/home/ed/inst/texlive-20080816-source/utils/xindy)
configure: running /bin/sh ./configure --disable-option-checking 
'--prefix=/home/ed'  '--enable-tetex-build' 
'--bindir=${exec_prefix}/bin/i686-pc-linux-gnu' 
'--libdir=${exec_prefix}/lib/i686-pc-linux-gnu' --cache-file=/dev/null 
--srcdir=.
[...]
checking for latex... no
checking for elatex... no
checking for lambda... no
configure: error: Unable to find a LaTeX application
configure: error: ./configure failed for utils/xindy

It looks like xindy requires an installed LaTeX to build, which 
creates a circular dependency.

To make sure TeX Live can build on systems that don't already have a 
TeX distribution installed, would it not be better to omit xindy from 
the default build?

-- 
Ed Avis <ed at membled.com>