[tlbuild] libiconv issue

[Paul Vojta]

On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 07:02:09PM -0600, Nelson H. F. Beebe wrote:
> 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?

Disabling libiconv for all builds seems like overkill.

People producing TeX Live builds should check for dependencies on shared
libraries in /usr/local, and invoke --without-lib* as necessary.  (IMHO.)

--Paul Vojta, vojta at math.berkeley.edu