[tlbuild] [tlbuilders] early report for texlive-20210106 snapshot builds

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

Today, I updated various scripts to begin work for the 2021 TeX Live
builds, and got successful builds, after installing a few more packages,
on CentOS 8 and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.  

However, on CentOS 7, which is the default O/S for almost all of our
users and systems, and is supported until mid-2024, I get this
failure:

	make[3]: Entering directory '/local/build/bare/texlive-20210106/source/Work/libs/icu'
	Sorry, the icu build systems disallows `make LDFLAGS=-static-libstdc++\'.

The reason for using -static-libstdc++ is that builds of several TeX
Live components require C++ compilation, and the native compiler is
g++-4.8.5, which is far too old to handle those parts of TeX Live.
Last year, as I documented in the section "CentOS 7.7 success" at

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

the builds ultimately succeeded, and I just verified from the build
logs from last spring that the -static-libstdc++ flag worked for the
icu components.

We have made a consistent point that the only shared libraries used by
TeXware executables are ones that are commonly found on many different
Linux distributions, and I'm certainly not proposing that we change
that policy: it would lead to huge problems at end user sites.

I don't understand the draconian approach of icu of disallowing use of
a static library; that surely is under the purview of the site that
builds the software, not the development team.

Because there are numerous systems in my 500+ machine build farm that
have native older C/C++ compilers, I suspect that more failures
compared to last year will be found as the build attempts progress.

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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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