texlive-20230313-source
Introduction to TeX Live from source
Note
According to https://www.tug.org/historic/
the master site in France only supports ftp and rsync. Now that
ftp is generally deprecated, that page has links to mirrors, some
of which support https, e.g. in Utah and Chemnitz as well as in
China. If you prefer to use a different mirror from the example
links here, you will need to navigate to
systems/historic/texlive/2023 or systems/texlive/2023 as the case
may be.
Most of TeX Live can be built from source without a pre-existing
installation, but xindy (for
indexing) needs working versions of latex and pdflatex when configure is run,
and the test suite and install for asy (for vector graphics) will
fail if TeX has not already been installed. Additionally,
biber is not provided within the
texlive source and the version of
dvisvgm in the texlive tree cannot be built if shared system
libraries are used.
All of those packages are dealt with on their own pages and can be
built after installing this package. If you have not already done
so, you should start at Setting the PATH for TeX Live
so that the final commands to initialize the new installation will
be found.
This package is known to build and work properly using an LFS 12.0
platform.
Package Information
Required Additional Downloads
Much of the texlive environment (including scripts, documentation,
fonts, and various other files) is not part of the source tarball.
You must download it separately. This will give you all of the
additional files which are provided by a full install of the binary
version, there is no realistic way to restrict which parts get
installed.
Because of the size of this package, it is unlikely to be mirrored
by BLFS mirrors. In case of difficulty, go to
http://www.ctan.org/mirrors/ to find a more-accessible mirror.
From the 2019 year, the tlpdb database of the packages within
texlive is no-longer installed with the source. But texdoc needs a cache file derived
from this (and will create the cache on its first run).
TeX Live from source Dependencies
Recommended
a graphical
environment
The source ships with its own versions of many libraries, and will use them unless
it is forced to use the system versions. The following are
recommended so that the system version will be used: Cairo-1.17.6, Fontconfig-2.14.2, FreeType-2.13.1, GC-8.2.4, Graphite2-1.3.14, HarfBuzz-8.1.1 (built with graphite2 enabled),
ICU-73.2, libpaper-2.1.1 (used by at least context and
xelatex), and libpng-1.6.40
Furthermore, the instructions below assume you are using the layout
described in Setting the PATH for TeX Live.
Optional
The source ships with its own versions of several libraries which
are either not under active development, or only used for limited
functionality. If you install these, as with some other optional
dependencies in this book you will need to tell configure to use the system
versions. GD,
t1lib, ZZIPlib,
TECkit
Runtime dependencies
Python-2.7.18 is used by the unmaintained ebong
CTAN module (intended for writing Bengali in Rapid Roman Format).
/usr/bin/python
is also in the
shebang line for the latex-papersize and lilyglyphs scripts, and
documentation at CTAN says both modules have been updated to work
with python3. In pythontex there are scripts to invoke python3 or
python2 according to the system's version of python. Ruby-3.2.2 is used by
two scripts, one is for pTex (Japanese vertical writing) and the
other is match_parens which might be generally useful. The perl
module
Tk, which needs to be run from an X11 session to run the tests
and requires Tk-8.6.13 is used by one of the scripts for ptex
and is needed for texdoctk (a GUI interface for finding
documentation files and opening them with the appropriate viewer).
ps2pdf, from
ghostscript-10.01.2, is used by some
utilities and scripts.
Installation of TeX Live
Install TeX Live by running the following commands:
Caution
If you wish to upgrade to current texlive on an older system where extra
packages (asymptote,
biber, dvisvgm, or xindy) have been installed, you will need to
reinstall those as well as fixing up your PATH
for $TEXLIVE_PREFIX
.
Note
A successful install requires some texlive commands to be run as
the root user, so we will export the TEXARCH variable to let
root
use it.
Now, as a normal user:
export TEXARCH=$(uname -m | sed -e 's/i.86/i386/' -e 's/$/-linux/') &&
patch -Np1 -i ../texlive-20230313-source-security_fix-1.patch &&
mkdir texlive-build &&
cd texlive-build &&
../configure -C \
--prefix=$TEXLIVE_PREFIX \
--bindir=$TEXLIVE_PREFIX/bin/$TEXARCH \
--datarootdir=$TEXLIVE_PREFIX \
--includedir=$TEXLIVE_PREFIX/include \
--infodir=$TEXLIVE_PREFIX/texmf-dist/doc/info \
--libdir=$TEXLIVE_PREFIX/lib \
--mandir=$TEXLIVE_PREFIX/texmf-dist/doc/man \
--disable-native-texlive-build \
--disable-static --enable-shared \
--disable-dvisvgm \
--with-system-cairo \
--with-system-fontconfig \
--with-system-freetype2 \
--with-system-gmp \
--with-system-graphite2 \
--with-system-harfbuzz \
--with-system-icu \
--with-system-libgs \
--with-system-libpaper \
--with-system-libpng \
--with-system-mpfr \
--with-system-pixman \
--with-system-zlib \
--with-banner-add=" - BLFS" &&
make
To test the results, issue: make -k
check. Two tests, psutils.test
and eptexdir/wcfname
are known to fail.
Now, as the root
user:
make install-strip &&
/sbin/ldconfig &&
make texlinks &&
mkdir -pv $TEXLIVE_PREFIX/tlpkg/TeXLive/ &&
install -v -m644 ../texk/tests/TeXLive/* $TEXLIVE_PREFIX/tlpkg/TeXLive/ &&
tar -xf ../../texlive-20230311-tlpdb-full.tar.gz -C $TEXLIVE_PREFIX/tlpkg
Note
Only run make
texlinks once. If it is rerun, it can change all
the program symlinks so that they point to themselves and are
useless.
Now install the additional files as the root
user:
tar -xf ../../texlive-20230313-texmf.tar.xz -C $TEXLIVE_PREFIX --strip-components=1
It has been established by Debian that the python scripts in l\atex-make
will work with python3, so update them to invoke
that by running the following command as the root
user:
for F in $TEXLIVE_PREFIX/texmf-dist/scripts/latex-make/*.py ; do
sed -i 's%/usr/bin/env python%/usr/bin/python3%' $F
done
Still as the root
user, initialize
the new system (the command fmtutil-sys --all will produce a
lot of output):
mktexlsr &&
fmtutil-sys --all
To allow Evince-44.3 or dvisvgm-3.1 to link to
libkpathsea.so
, as the root
user (re)create a symlink from
/usr/lib
:
ln -svf $TEXLIVE_PREFIX/lib/libkpathsea.so /usr/lib
Note
TeXLive includes some files for ConTeXt but the source of that is
separate and has moved on from using luatex in the previous
'mkiv' version to using luametatex which can be pulled with git
from github
luametatex. LuaMetaTeX uses meson and ninja, but it does not
fit easily into the BLFS layout of TeXLive.
However, with a little extra work 'mkiv' files can still be
processed using the files shipped in texmf.
Fixes to use ConTeXt will be removed
when the texlive source next has to be updated for either a
vulnerability fix which requires backporting luatex changes, or
for TeXLive 2024. If you are a BLFS user of ConTeXt you should be
prepared to use the latest tag from github (the link is in first
paragraph of this Note). Building and installing that to work
with a BLFS install of TeXLive will not be a trivial
exercise.
The following steps, run as the root
user, will create mtxrun and context.
sed -e '/local template=\[\[--ini/s/\(primaryflags%\)\(.*\)/\1 --socket --shell-escape \2/' \
-e '/local template=\[\[%primaryflags%/s/\(primaryflags%\)\(.*\)/\1 --socket --shell-escape \2/' \
-i $TEXLIVE_PREFIX/texmf-dist/scripts/context/lua/mtxrun.lua &&
mkdir -pv $TEXLIVE_PREFIX/texmf-var/luatex-cache/context/ &&
ln -sfv /$TEXLIVE_PREFIX/texmf-dist/scripts/context/lua/mtxrun.lua \
/$TEXLIVE_PREFIX/bin/$TEXARCH/mtxrun &&
cat > $TEXLIVE_PREFIX/bin/$TEXARCH/context << EOF
#!/bin/sh
export TEXMF=$TEXLIVE_PREFIX/texmf-dist;
export TEXMFCNF=$TEXLIVE_PREFIX/texmf-dist/web2c;
export TEXMFCACHE=$TEXLIVE_PREFIX/texmf-var/luatex-cache/context/;
$TEXLIVE_PREFIX/bin/$TEXARCH/mtxrun --script context "\$@"
EOF
chmod -v 0755 $TEXLIVE_PREFIX/bin/$TEXARCH/context
You can now proceed to asymptote-2.86, biber-2.19, dvisvgm-3.1 and / or
xindy-2.5.1 if you wish to install them.
Command Explanations
patch -Np1 -i
../texlive-20230313-source-security_fix-1.patch:
this updates the luatex source to v1.17.0 to fix security issues.
sed -e '/local template (...)'
(...)mtxrun.lua: this makes a change in a
texmf-dist script so that ConTeXt can now run with luatex-v1.17.0.
-C: create
config.cache, this saves significant time in a parallel build.
--prefix=, --bindir=, --datarootdir=,
--infodir=, --mandir= ...
: these switches ensure that
the files installed from source will overwrite any corresponding
files previously installed by install-tl-unx so that the alternative methods
of installing texlive are
consistent.
--includedir=, --libdir=
...
: these switches ensure that the libraries and
include files will be within the directories for this year's
texlive.
--disable-static
: This
switch prevents installation of static versions of the libraries.
--enable-shared
: Use shared
versions of libkpathsea
, libptexenc
, libsynctex
, libtexlua52
and libtexluajit
.
--with-system-...
: Unless
this parameter is used, the included versions of these libraries
will be statically compiled into the programs which need them. If
you decided not to install a recommended library, omit the
corresponding switch.
--disable-dvisvgm: As
noted above, the shipped version of dvisvgm, which has modified
configuration files, cannot be built with shared system libraries.
/sbin/ldconfig: this
has to be run here so that make
texlinks can use kpsewhich.
make texlinks : this
runs the texlinks.sh script to create symbolic links from formats
to engines. In practice, several of the targets such as
xetex are now
separate binaries and for these it will report "file already
exists".
tar -xf texlive-20230313-texmf.tar.xz
-C $TEXLIVE_PREFIX --strip-components=1: the
tarball contains the files for the texmf-dist directory, and
because of its size we do not want to waste time and space
untarring it and then copying the files.
install -v -m644
../texk/tests/TeXLive/*
$TEXLIVE_PREFIX/tlpkg/TeXLive/: This puts the perl
modules TLConfig.pm
and TLUtils.pm
into the directory where the binary
installer puts them - it is at the start of the perl @INC@ PATH
within texlive when installed using the above configure switches.
Without these modules, texlive is unusable.
mktexlsr: Create an
ls-R
file which lists what was
installed - this is used by kpathsea to find files.
fmtutil-sys --all:
This initializes the TeX formats, Metafont bases and Metapost mems.
mkdir -pv
$TEXLIVE_PREFIX/texmf-var/luatex-cache/context/:
the context script created after this will not run correctly if
this directory is not present.
--without-x
: use this if you do not
have Xorg installed.
There are many other '--disable' or '--without' options. Some of
them such as --without-texinfo
are
accepted but no longer do anything, others will prevent a program
being built - but the far greater amount of space used for the
related items in texmf means there is no obvious benefit from
disabling a few of the programs.
Contents
Installed Programs:
Over 300 binaries and symlinks to
scripts
Installed Libraries:
libkpathsea.so, libptexenc.so,
libsynctex.so, libtexlua52.so, libtexluajit.so
Installed Directories:
$TEXLIVE_PREFIX/bin,
$TEXLIVE_PREFIX/include, $TEXLIVE_PREFIX/lib,
$TEXLIVE_PREFIX/texmf-dist
Short Descriptions
TeX programs
|
The programs included in TeX are too numerous to individually
list. Please refer to the individual program HTML and PDF
pages in the various html, man, or pdf files within the
subdirectories of 2023/texmf-dist/ . Using texdoc pdflatex (
replace pdflatex
with the command name ) may also be useful
|
libkpathsea.so
|
(kpathsearch) exists to look up a file in a list of
directories and is used by kpsewhich
|
libptexenc.so
|
is a library for Japanese pTeX (publishing TeX)
|
libsynctex.so
|
is the SyncTeX (Synchronize TeXnology) parser library
|
libtexlua52.so
|
provides Lua 5.2, modified for use with LuaTeX
|
libtexluajit.so
|
provides LuaJIT, modified for use with LuaJITTeX
|