tlbuild: Top-level directories
6.2 Top-level directories
=========================
Here is a brief description of the top-level directories in the TeX Live
source tree.
As mentioned at the beginning of ⇒Overview of build system,
the main source directories are 'texk/' (TeX-specific programs and
libraries), 'utils/' (additional programs), and 'libs/' (generic
libraries).
In addition, the top-level directories 'am/' and 'm4/' contain
'Makefile.am' fragments and Autoconf macros, respectively, used in many
places. Specifically, the file 'm4/kpse-pkgs.m4' contains lists of all
program and library modules; missing modules are silently ignored.
(This helps in creating cut-down source trees.)
Each module contributes fragments (in separate files) defining its
capabilities and requirements to the 'configure.ac' scripts at the
top-level and in the subdirectories 'libs', 'utils', and 'texk'. The
fragments from program modules supply 'configure' options to disable or
enable building them; those from library modules specify if an installed
(system) version of that library can be used. This ultimately
determines which modules need to be built--although all modules must be
configured for the benefit of 'make' targets such as 'dist' or
'distcheck'.
The top-level 'build-aux/' directory contains the common files
'compile', 'config.guess', 'config.sub', 'depcomp', etc. used by most
packages. These are taken from the GNU Gnulib sources
(<https://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib>), which in turn synchronizes with
any ultimate upstream repository. There are independent copies of some
of these in a few other places, e.g.,
'libs/freetype2/freetype-*/builds/unix/'. The 'reautoconf' script does
not touch those, but a TL cron job keeps them in sync (nightly).
When the top-level './Build' script is used to build TL, two more two
more top-level directories appear: 'Work/' for the build tree, and
'inst/' for the install tree (from 'make install'). These names (and
everything else about 'Build''s operation) can be changed by setting
environment variables before running it; see the script source.
Info Catalog
tlbuild: Build system tools
tlbuild: Layout and infrastructure
tlbuild: Autoconf macros