[tlbuild] Configure issues with texlive-20091107

[Norbert Preining]

On Fr, 15 Jan 2010, Angel Tsankov wrote:
> 1. over the Internet using the net installer;
> 2. from the iso image;

Right.

> 3. build the binaries from source using one or more of the tarballs.

That is only half the work.

> -- the Build script is located in the 'source' tarball.  Is it necessary  
> to unpack any of the other 3 tarballs before running this script?

No.

> -- having built and installed the binaries (by running Build or  
> configure && make world), do I have to download the texmf and texmf-dist  
> directories from the SVN repo, or may I use the 'texmf' tarball instead?

You can use the texmf tarballs. If all the files are in the right
place you will be able to use the tex programs.

But tlmgr will not work.

> -- what is the purpose of the 'extra' and 'bin' tarballs?  I guess  

bin: pre-built binaries, if you have a supported arch it is probably
better to try these, as it is quite tricky to build all binaries,
especially xindy.

extra: forget it, it contains some documentation, LICENSE, release
numbers, portable scripts, index.html for the main dir. You can look
into it, not soo much. (that is in 2008).
extra in 2009: contains the tlpkg/TeXLive perl modules needed if
you want to run tlmgr.

But be warned, if you do NOT make a proper installation with install-tl
the tlpkg/texlvie.tlpdb will not be set up, and usage of tlmgr(.pl)
will be broken. That is fine if you update the package in a different
way. In Debian we not even ship tlmgr.


> copying the pre-built binaries (for my architecture) that are found in  
> the 'bin' tarball is roughly equivalent to building and installing the  
> 'source' package.  Am I right?

roughly, but unfortunately I am not sure if it is 100%. Some links
to scripts have been (at some poiint, we are getting rid of that)
been installed by hand into bin/*/

Best wishes

Norbert
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Norbert Preining            preining@{jaist.ac.jp, logic.at, debian.org}
JAIST, Japan            TU Wien, Austria           Debian TeX Task Force
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