[tlbuild] more builds at Utah, and comments on clisp

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

Today I completed three more successful builds of the texlive-20150328
snapshot:

	armv7l-linux		ArchLinux
	ia64-linux		Red Hat 5
	x86_64-kfreebsd7	kFreeBSD 7.7 [aka Debian GNU/kFreeBSD 7 (wheezy)]

I've also been looking into builds of clisp for support of the xindy
indexing program.

Red Hat 5, 6, and 7 ship no flavor of Common Lisp whatsoever.  Some
GNU/Linux distributions also have sbcl (Steel Bank Common Lisp), or
ecl (Embeddable Common Lisp), or gcl (GNU Common Lisp).  However, none
of those works with xindy.

I found today in numerous build attempts for clisp-2.49 (dated
7-Jul-2010, the latest available release) that I either get build
failures, or segment violations in its preparation of its memory
image, on multiple platforms, and with multiple compilers on the same
platform (gcc-3.4, gcc-4.4.7, clang-3.2, clang-3.4, and clang-3.5).

I've also tried building clisp with and without libsigsegv support.

I'll make more attempts later this week, but at this stage, I'm not
hopeful.  Indeed, when I look at the 49 bin/* directories in my 2014
installation tree, only 25 have xindy.run.  For 2015, only 10 of the
15 successes so far have xindy.run.

xindy is one of two executables (the other being xdvi-xaw) where ldd
reports references to libraries in the /usr/local/ tree, which cannot
be the case for binaries distributed on the TeX Live DVD.

The problems with clisp are disappointing: it could be something
rather minor that is causing the failures on multiple systems, yet the
package seems to have had no maintenance in five years, and there is
no directory for test versions of clisp at alpha.gnu.org, or on
sourceforge.net, or at clisp.org.

I've even tried builds of earlier clisp-2.4[5678] releases, but they
too have all failed on the single platform (Debian 8.0 x86-64) where I
made that experiment.  Although Debian 6 and 7.7 have native clisp
packages available via apt-get, Debian 8 does not.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- 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/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------