Just a heads-up of my current plans, if my suggestions for asy work: At the moment, the svn book has a _somewhat_complicated_ two-pass build of texlive so that xindy (a modern indexing package) and asy (a vector graphics package) can be built. I have now become aware of three things which make me want to use separate versions of xindy and asy:
1. They have fairly-frequent releases, using the now-old versions in texlive has no obvious benefits for the things which have to be built separately (we prefer newer to older). 2. Xindy continues to work fine on x86_64. But I have discovered that it does not work on i686 (neither LFS/BLFS-7.6, nor recent svn). Putting it separately would allow a convenient note that it does not work on i686 (and perhaps, somebody more clever than me will be able to break into the scripts to find out what is wrong). It is also much easier to build the separate xindy after installing basic texlive - no need to "rebuild with added xindy goodness" followed by "and now only install xindy". 3. Asy, including the version in texlive-2014, has been broken by ghostscript-9.15. Specifically, at least one of the supplied documentation files invokes /usr/lib/libgs.so [ do not ask me the details, I do not understand it ]. The build uses 'asy' on a nest of scripts, in this case apparently to produce a graphic of a graph, and it fails because a subscript is out of range. I can see where libgs gets mentioned, and I know that it works with ghostscript-9.14, so I am hoping to install 9.14 into /opt/oldgs and get it to work. If it does, I propose to point to the 9.14 version in the 7.6 book and provide instructions on how to build/install the minimal old version. This is NOT yet tested. I will also note that asy includes comments about downloading a pre-created PDF doc from sourceforge, for cases where texlive is broken. But in this case it appears to me that asy itself has become broken. Hopefully, the maintainer or somebody else will work out what the problem is, but in the meantime I would like to install a working asy (pretty pictures are nice ;) So, if I can successfully work around the asy problem, I plan to separate these two packages. That will allow me to remove the second pass of texlive-from-source. Note that anybody who installs the binary will probably not care about any of the from-source parts, and I will reword as necessary. As to other things, I am fast approaching an "up to my arse in alligators" situation and I really cannot justify spending time on any of BLFS for the moment (that includes this, but needs must when the devil drives). ĸen -- Nanny Ogg usually went to bed early. After all, she was an old lady. Sometimes she went to bed as early as 6 a.m. -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
