[tlbuild] Building without ICU

[Mojca Miklavec]

On 1 March 2018 at 01:12, Karl Berry wrote:
>     What's the magic command to exclude any binaries from TL build that
>     depend on ICU?
>
> I'm not sure there is one. Maybe --without-icu? I see some tests for
> that in the source, although it doesn't show up in configure --help.
> (I don't know why not, seems like a deficiency.)
>
> A quick shows that at least these programs that depend on it:
>   bibtexu upmendex xetex

After quite a bit of exploration it looks as if harfbuzz also needs
ICU, while harfbuzz is requested for web2c, so basically I would have
to disable web2c which hardly makes any sense any longer.

While I don't know if harfbuzz is unavoidable dependency for web2c, I
realized that I can install icu from a package manager and then use
--with-system-icu --disable-native-build. Since the generated binaries
won't be distributed, this should not be a problem, but I was able to
discover a few other problems that could get a fix eventually. Fixing
ICU can be postponed for later.

Meanwhile the fix for Snow Leopard and Solaris 10 has been accepted
upstream in zziplib and should be available in v0.13.69 (probably
soon). I noticed that TL uses quite substantial patching of zziplib.
Did you ever try to submit those patches upstream? I started wondering
because I was apparently able to build zziplib from TL, but not from
upstream.

Mojca