TeX Live and pdflatex from source

[Nick D]

Hi TeX Live team,

I have been using LaTeX with TeX Live for a few years now and have been very appreciative of the work the community has contributed.

I am currently tasked with a new dilemma. I want to use TeX Live and pdflatex at my work to typeset some documents as part of some internal pipelines. The only catch is, nothing can be precompiled binaries and everything must be built from source code as part of my requirements. I originally saw someone else ask a similar question on the tlbuild mailing list here: https://tug.org/pipermail/tlbuild/2018q1/004133.html and it was suggested to follow up on the tex-live mailing list.

Essentially what I want to do is build TeX Live from source and then build the various packages I need (fonts, styles, ect.) to build LaTeX. My aim is to have a working version of pdflatex. So far I have been able to accomplish the following.

  1.  Cloned the TeX Live sources from the github repo here: https://github.com/TeX-Live/texlive-source to "texlive"
  2.  Created a directory in that folder called "texlive/artifacts"
  3.  Ran the configuration script with a prefix "texlive/configure --prefix=texlive/artifacts"
  4.  Ran the make file "make -j8"
  5.  Then installed the libs and binaries in the prefix directory with "make install"

>From this point I see some of the binaries created in "texlive/artifacts/bin/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu" like "latexmk", "pdftex", and "tlmgr" just to name a few. [I should point out that when I try to run some of these binaries like "tlmgr", I do get the error message of "Can't locate TeXLive/TLConfig.pm in @INC (you may need to install the TeXLive::TLConfig module)"]

>From this I am trying to understand what the next steps would be. My goal is to get a working version of "pdflatex" built which I think requires getting the pdflatex format files to use with "pdftex". Does this involve getting "tlmgr" to work so I can download the packages from CTAN?

If anyone could provide some guidance or assistance on how to move forward, I would appreciate it very much. Once again thank you for all your work.

Best,
Nick
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/attachments/20231024/9110410e/attachment.htm>