Re: Beginner question: How to build meta post only

On 2025-12-12 at 13:28:56 +0000, Jonathan Fine wrote:

 > Hi Reinhard
 > 
 > Thank you for suggesting Build. Please confirm that the resulting mpost is
 > standalone. I ask because I was expecting dependencies on texlive and
 > perhaps other shared objects.

Hi Jonathan,
as usual in TeX Live it's statically linked:

  $ ldd ./Work/texk/web2c/mpost
          linux-vdso.so.1 =>  (0x00007ffcf13f5000)
          libm.so.6 => /lib64/libm.so.6 (0x00007f76fb2b7000)
          libc.so.6 => /lib64/libc.so.6 (0x00007f76faee9000)
          /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f76fb5b9000)

xetex is an exception because only the system fontconfig knows where
the fonts are located.

I'm not sure to avoid all dependencies.  mpost still requires a .mem
file (similar to a .fmt file in tex) and it looks for file texmf.cnf.
The latter is used by kpathsea but can be very small if only mpost has
to be supported.  It seems that there is no configure option to
disable kpathsea.

Regardless of whether it's linked against kpathsea or not I expect
severe problems if a standalone mpost and TeX Live are installed at
the same time (two programs with the same name in PATH).

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                            Phone: +49-511-3373112
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