TeXLive architecture dependent files

Categories: FreeBSD, Sysadmin.

I am having fun with TeXLive under FreeBSD, and while trying to understand what is utterly needed in the 5229 packages provided by the distribution, I discovered a funny thing:

$ ls texlive.infra.*.tar.lzma
texlive.infra.alpha-linux.tar.lzma       texlive.infra.mips-irix.tar.lzma
texlive.infra.amd64-freebsd.tar.lzma     texlive.infra.powerpc-aix.tar.lzma
texlive.infra.doc.tar.lzma               texlive.infra.powerpc-linux.tar.lzma
texlive.infra.hppa-hpux.tar.lzma         texlive.infra.sparc-linux.tar.lzma
texlive.infra.i386-freebsd.tar.lzma      texlive.infra.sparc-solaris.tar.lzma
texlive.infra.i386-linux.tar.lzma        texlive.infra.universal-darwin.tar.lzma
texlive.infra.i386-openbsd.tar.lzma      texlive.infra.win32.tar.lzma
texlive.infra.i386-solaris.tar.lzma      texlive.infra.x86_64-linux.tar.lzma

All these distfiles (excepted the one emphasized) contains the same program compiled for different architectures. As the name suggest, it is related to the infrastructure of TeXLive, that is the piece of code handling the brunch of .tar.lzma distfiles.
Let's see what is packaged in one of these files:

$ lzma -dkc texlive.infra.i386-freebsd.tar.lzma | tar tf -
tlpkg/installer/lzma/lzma.i386-freebsd
tlpkg/installer/lzma/lzmadec.i386-freebsd
tlpkg/tlpobj/texlive.infra.i386-freebsd.tlpobj

Cool! This package includes FreeBSD binaries for decompressing .lzma archives, (e.g. this package)! Hopefully we already have archivers/lzmautils for doing that.

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