Kpathsea Releases

Kpathsea is a library for path searching. It is part of the TeXLive distribution.

This repository is a collection of standalone Kpathsea release archives. Installing Kpathsea without the rest of the TeXLive distribution is not straightforward, and it is needed for dvisvgm. While dvisvgm is also included with TeXLive, that version is generally very old. So, I started this repository to collect Kpathsea releases to ease installation of newer versions of dvisvgm, especially on macOS where the Kpathsea library is not available.

Working with release archives

Creating

To create a new release archive, follow these steps:

1. Find the revision of the release by looking through the changes to c-auto.in in the TeXLive svn repository.

   For example, this diff shows that version 6.3.0 (see KPSEVERSION) was released at revision 46759.

2. Run the script in this repository with the version and revision as arguments.

   For example:

   $ ./create 6.3.0 46759
   

3. Commit the created file to the repository.

   For example:

   $ git add kpathsea-6.3.0.tar.gz
   $ git commit -m 'Add kpathsea-6.3.0.tar.gz'
   

Testing

After creating a release archive, test it for building using the test script in this repository.

For example, assuming you created the release archive kpathsea-6.3.0.tar.gz, test it with:

$ ./test kpathsea-6.3.0.tar.gz

Building

To build a release archive, follow these steps:

1. Extract the archive.

   For example:

   $ tar xzf kpathsea-6.3.0.tar.gz
   

2. Navigate to the kpathsea directory.

   For example:

   $ cd kpathsea-6.3.0/texk/kpathsea
   

3. Configure, build, and (optionally) install.

   For example:

   $ ./configure && make && make install
   

For ./configure options, run ./configure --help. In particular, you probably want to use --prefix=<path> to configure the installation directory to something other than the default /usr/local.

Background

The process for extracting Kpathsea from the TexLive distribution and building it was initially informed by this Gist and this blog entry by Toby Fleming. I use svn instead of rsync to check out specific revisions.