[tlbuild] PPC builds

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Sat, 15 Feb 2020 at 00:20, Johannes Hielscher wrote:
>
> To sum up, I'm not advocating for embracing yet another exotic platform
> into TL binary distribution (unless audible demand), but I am collecting
> experience, and am open to test progress in platform-agnosticism on a
> IBM POWER9 machine.

My personal opinion is that it probably doesn't make much sense to
distribute binaries either unless you hear from more people, but
getting the builds work out of the box on exotic platforms might be a
worthwhile goal.

Thanks a lot for pointing to the luajit patches. Given the complexity
of those, it would help to push the author and upstream to finish the
work (the patch isn't applying in a clean way), as maintaining those
in TeX Live would be a complete nightmare. I've tried other (way
easier) patches to build luajit on PPC darwing many years ago, but as
mentioned here, ffi was defunct. Creating a basic ConTeXt format
worked, but documents were somewhat corrupted.

What we could easily to as a first step is to automatically disable
LUAJIT on this platform (we do it for sparc solaris, ppc darwin ...)
until the patches get accepted upstream.

You mention issues with GD and libpng. I have issues building those on
a regular aarch64 platform (using armbian) which lacks png development
headers (as in: did not run "apt install" yet), so fixing anything in
that area would certainly also benefit other (way more frequent)
users.

Mojca