[tlbuild] libiconv issue

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

The systems in our test lab (ca. 25 flavors of Unix, with more
planned) have a large number of locally-installed packages, and some
of those packages expect, or even require, libiconv, the GNU code set
conversion utilities and library.

However, few Linux distributions, or other flavors of Unix, include
libiconv as a standard component.  That means that a build of a
package that can optionally use libiconv will not find it on those
systems, and will work without it.  

However, on ours, libiconv's files are found in
/usr/local/{lib,lib64,include,....}, so configure scripts discover it,
and include in the builds.  For our local installations, that is fine,
but it is not wanted for TeX Live builds, because those executables
should not have any dependencies on shared libraries in /usr/local.

The normal build of libiconv creates only shared libraries: there is
no /usr/local/lib/libiconv.a file to get a static link against.

For now, I've just edited source/Work/texk/xdvik/c-auto.h to comment
out the three lines that contain ICONV, and then rebuilt xdvi with

	make iconv_libs=

However, it would be helpful for TeX Live builds to modify xdvik's
configure.ac to remove (preferably, comment out, with an explanation)
the

	XDVI_CHECK_ICONV

line and regenerate the configure script.  That should, I think,
prevent the build from referencing anything from libiconv.

I have, however, not yet done this myself yet, because I'd first like
feedback from other developers on this list.

Comments?

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- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe at math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe at acm.org  beebe at computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
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