[tlbuild] another progress report from Utah

[Karl Berry]

    NetBSD:
    configure: error: cannot determine TeX Live platform name
    === configuring in biber failed

Jukka Salmi has previously been the one to provide netbsd binaries.
(See list of people at end of tug.org/texlive/build.html.)

Jukka, are you there?

    OpenBSD:

A few years ago, Edd Barrett built OpenBSD binaries.  Then he decided
it was better to provide them as part of OpenBSD instead of having the
TL "standalone" binaries.  I don't remember the details.

    And what about GNU Hurd?  

No one has ever tried to build on Hurd to my knowledge.

    And the ARM CPU platform?

Boris (Veytsman) is building binaries for armel-linux
(and Mojca (Miklavec) for mipsel-linux).

    Please, do post a record of your TeX Live 2012 build successes, and
    failures, so we can better gauge where we stand.
    
Pretty much everyone else reported success with an initial build.
It's all the platforms you are trying which no one has dealt with
before ...

    then provide additional platform-specific binary distributions as
    Web-only downloads.  

Yes, and that was what I also suggested to you :).

    I suspect that tlmgr could easily be tweaked to report the
    additional ones that it finds at the TL master site, or its several
    mirrors.

The initial installation is done by install-tl, not tlmgr.
The idea of determining the platform menu at runtime sounds fraught with
reliability problems to me.  There is already support for "custom"
binaries, downloaded separately/manually:
  http://tug.org/texlive/custom-bin.html
That's the existing/low impact way to support as many platforms as you
and everyone else wants to provide binaries for.

Thanks,
k