[tlbuild] running TL24 pretest on OpenBSD

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Tue, 20 Feb 2024 at 23:52, Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org> wrote:
>
> Hi Robert!
>
>     running eg. x.y at the time when x.(y+2)
>     has been released is fine, and I know quite a
>     number of people who are doing this.
>
> I didn't know that. That seemingly makes it sensible for us to include
> openbsd binaries in our upstream TL, for the benefit of such
> people. There is little cost to it, anyway, as long as TL includes only
> one set of binaries for openbsd as for any other platform.  (It would
> create too many special cases to have binaries for multiple OS
> versions.)

I leave it up to you to decide, but if it was up to me, I would ship
the binaries with the version number in the name ("openbsd7.4" instead
of just "openbsd").
According to my understanding the "special case" would require
approximately the same amount of patching as support for multiple
versions of macOS binaries.

Right now every now and then someone pops up to ask about OpenBSD
binaries (in very very rare cases), you explain to him why we don't
distribute them, and the discussion stops (except now when Norbert
actually implemented a CI before the discussion even started).

If you start distributing "some" version with TL, the binaries would
have to be built with an unreleased (i.e. future) version of OpenBSD,
testing would be even more limited ("regular" users will not have
updated to that not-yet-released-os when TL pretest starts), and in
November you'll get complaints piling up, claiming that TL is broken.
With a versioned name TeX Live installer would say that binaries don't
exist, while unversion one will try to install and fail in
weird/not-too-helpful ways.

Mojca