Re: Texlive and native-inputs

[Andreas Enge]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 06:13:09PM +0100, John Darrington wrote:
> If they were "normal" inputs and you were cross compiling, then the packages 
> which
> are made available, would be those for the target system, not the native one. 
>  Hence
> they could not run, and the build would break.

Well, my point is that probably the scripts are not run during the build
process, but on the target system.

For instance, texlive installs a file
   texlive-2014-data/texmf-dist/scripts/psutils/psjoin.pl ,
which I suppose does what its name says.

Because we have perl as a native input, patch-shebangs replaces its first
line by
   #!/gnu/store/5x0h6n8ln2fvaqk1q2ji79x08y8bdr35-perl-5.16.1/bin/perl
Then if we are cross-compiling with perl as a native input, this is the perl
of the build and not of the target machine, and the user calling psjoin.pl
on the target machine has a dangling interpreter here.

So I think perl, python and tcsh should be normal inputs; as far as I know,
they are not used during the build process of texlive.

>      Or what happens if both is the case?
> In that case, the package would need to be declared as both an input and a 
> native-input.

Would it work? One would need to patch-shebang with the normal input and
use the native-input for scripts that are used during the build process.
Is this distinguished somehow? (Well, there is of course the problem of
scripts that are used during the build process _and_ installed on the user's
machine, which means that the package is simply not cross-compilable in
our setting. One could imagine, for instance, that psjoin.pl is used for
concatenating a set of postscript files to create the documentation depending
on how the package is configured, and that it is also included in the
package for installation as a handy tool.)

Andreas