On 3 May 2021, at 09:29, Nicola
Sorry, my explanation of what I am trying to achieve was a bit too terse.
There is a little wonderful app on the App Store, called iSH (https://github.com/ish-app/ish), which essentially allows you to run a 32-bit x86 Alpine Linux distribution on the iPad. One feature of the app is that it can import and mount several "file systems". One way to create such a file system is to export a Docker container.
So, what one can do is create a Docker container in some other device (I use my laptop), configure it as desired, then export it into a .tar archive, copy it into the iPad, and import it into iSH. This is better than installing/building packages directly inside the app, because (a) compiling on the iPad is extremely slow, and (b) some packages may raise errors if one tries to install them inside the app (TeX Live being one of them: this link explains the issue and the Docker workaround: https://github.com/ish-app/ish/issues/1123).
iSH emulates x86_32 and uses Musl. AFAICS, ConTeXt LMTX currently only provides a 64-bit download for Linux Musl. So, the next best alternative is to use ConTeXt from TeX Live.
So, this is where I am at: I am trying to make ConTeXt work inside an x86 Alpine Linux Musl container, using the official Alpine package.
Thank-you for the explanation - that's much clearer. I've experimented a bit with Docker and I've managed to get a stand-alone LMTX install to work under a 32-bit Alpine Linux that has had the glibc library added. This should - fingers crossed - work in iSH. You need to set up a working directory containing: - the 32-bit LMTX downloaded from "http://lmtx.pragma-ade.nl/install-lmtx/context-linux.zip" - the file "Dockerfile" that is attached to this email - the modified LMTX install file "alpine-glibc-install.sh" that is attached to this email - a subdirectory "sources" where you can place a hello world tex file Use the following commands to build and run the container: $ docker build . -t context-alpine-glibc $ docker run -it -v $(pwd)/sources:/src context-alpine-glibc /bin/ash The run command bind mounts the sub-directory "sources" so that it is accessible from within the container as the /src directory.[2] Once you are in the container run these commands to process the hello world document: # cd /src # context hello_world.tex There's no PDF viewer installed so you'll need to view it from the host in "sources". On the Mac this works as expected. Over to you to try in iSH. :-) [1] The install.sh file needs to be hacked because the CPU architecture check (uname -m) returns the word size of the host computer, not the container, so I just hard-coded the values. :-) [2] On Windows use something like: $ docker run -it -v %cd%/sources:/src context-alpine-glibc /bin/ash — Bruce Horrocks Hampshire, UK