TeX Live 2021 status on DragonFlyBSD

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

The annual TeX Live release work began a week ago, and I'm pleased to
report that the first binaries, and build comments, for DragonFlyBSD
5.8.3 are now available from these URLs:

	http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/texlive-utah-2021/
	http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/texlive-utah-2021/#dragonflybsd-5.8.3-x86_64

Kudos go to the DragonFlyBSD team for keeping compilers and 
packages at modern levels: the first TeX Live 2021 source
tree build on DragonFlyBSD 5.8.3 was flawless and problem free.

Alas, FreeBSD is now almost six years behind in its packaging of TeX
Live, and DragonFlyBSD is too: /usr/bin/tex reports "TeX Live 2015".

There is not yet a TeX Live 2021 pretest package, so I just copied
over the recently updated 2020 tree into a 2021 tree under which the
bin directory contains executable files for numerous platforms.

The official release of TeX Live 2021 DVDs and ISO images is expected
to be available in late April or early May; however, because of severe
space constraints, they contain binaries only for the most widely used
platforms; the Utah archive above usually supplies them for scores of
additional systems.

As always, TeX executables expect to find at run time a precompiled
`format' file (*.fmt) that includes all of the standard packages
expected for that executable; that considerably speeds processing of
small jobs, because the *.fmt files can be directly loaded into TeX's
memory without parsing.

The *.fmt files are easily updated like this:

	fmtutil --sys --all

They are CPU and O/S and byte-order INdependent, but DEPENDENT on the
current TeX Live source tree.  Thus, a single TeX Live YYYY tree needs
to have the *.fmt files created on just one architecture; all other
architectures can use them directly.

Feedback and suggestions are always welcome; send e-mail to me off
list.

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- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe at math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe at acm.org  beebe at computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
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