[tlbuild] more progress at Utah: asymptote, clisp, xindy, and gcc news

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

I'm gradually adding builds of asymptote to the binary distributions
at the bin link in

	http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/texlive/

The build-asymptote.sh script at that site is the one that I run
after a TeX Live 2016 build completes.

The build total is now 58 systems, with OpenBSD 5.7 x86-64 and Debian
7 Linux SPARC being recent additions.

Yesterday, I found the reason for build failures on OpenBSD 5.7 and
earlier: the OpenBSD package system installs header files in
/usr/local/include/kpathsea, and shared and static libraries in
/usr/local/lib/kpathsea.*, and gcc's obnoxious behavior of insisting
on searching those directories first means that the kpathsea header
files that it finds are not only old, but incompatible with the
current kpathsea.

The solution is to hide all of those files by renaming or moving them,
and builds on the remaining OpenBSD systems are in progress now.

I've also investigated the problem of providing clisp for xindy
builds.  clisp is a BIG issue: it has not been updated since
7-Jul-2010, with the last release numbered 2.49.  While that version
builds and passes its tests on several of my systems, on many others,
it gets pointer-violation crashes in its test suite.  I don't care to
install such seriously-failing builds.  The pointer errors remain when
clisp is built with various versions of gcc and clang, so compiler
code-generation errors are unlikely to be the cause.

In some cases, I have been able to build clisp 2.48 (28-Jul-2009), but
on some systems, that too fails with the same pointer issues.  

clisp 2.47 (23-Oct-2008) does not work on the systems where I tried
builds because its expects support of software versions that are no
longer available.

Although many Linux distributions supply a clisp package, some major
ones lack it, including all Red Hat, CentOS, ClearOS, ScientificLinux,
and some recent Debian and Fedora versions.

clisp is absent from DragonFlyBSD, FreeBSD, and Solaris (except in the
3rd-party CSW package system), but present in ArchLinux, some Fedora,
KFreeBSD, Knoppix, Mageia, NetBSD, OpenBSD, OpenIndiana, OpenMandriva,
OpenSUSE, PCLinuxOS, Slackware, and Ubuntu.  It is available in Apple
Mac OS X in at least the MacPorts system, but not from Apple itself.
I looked in the Fink package system for Mac OS X, and find mention of
clisp in other packages, but not clisp itself.

Recent DragonFlyBSD and FreeBSD releases have SteelBank Common Lisp,
sbcl, and many Linux distributions have GNU Common Lisp, gcl, or
Embeddable Common-Lisp, ecl, but I don't know what it would take to
make xindy use alternate Common Lisp bases, or perhaps Scheme
implementations, such as GNU guile.

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P.S. For compiler buffs, the gcc-7.x family work has begun
(ftp://gcc.gnu.org/pub/gcc/snapshots/), and the first official release
of the 6.x family, 6.1.0, appeared at
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gcc/gcc-6.1.0/ yesterday. See
https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-6/changes.html for a description. I have both
installed now on a few of my systems.  However, they are not advisable
for building other packages that are to be widely distributed, because
of the inevitable library and kernel dependencies of the compilers and
the code that they create.

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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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