[tlbuild] Problems with building texlive/context from its sources

[Karl Berry]

    Sorry for those (perhaps obvious) questions 

No problem. They aren't obvious.

    find the texlive building process quite confusing. 

With several gigabytes of data files, I can't implement
"configure && make install" to do everything. Complications ensue,
no matter how hard I try to make it "just work", because everyone wants
it to work differently :).

    Also, I could not find any installation guide that covers the
    scenario of building context within a texlive 2023 installation from
    its sources on linux.

You're right: there isn't any, because the luametatex sources aren't
part of the TL source tree.

Besides the discussions that Ken pointed you at, I just wrote a new
section at
  https://tug.org/texlive/build.html#lmtx
that, I hope, answers your questions. (In short: you should get the
upstream sources and build them with cmake. I don't do this and don't
know anything much about it.)

Another possibility is to package context from its own distribution(s),
and omit it from any TL packaging. (I just added a note to that effect
on https://tug.org/texlive/distro.html.)

Happy building,
Karl