Am Sonntag, 3. Februar 2013 schrieb Ludovic Courtès:
> OK.  So the catalogs are built once for all during the build, right?

Yes, over the full content of the texlive distribution.

> Perhaps “data” would be a (slightly) more descriptive name?

Okay, why not; I used "share" because normally the subdirectories end up in 
"share".

> Looks like your approach works fine, but maybe we could still ask Karl
> Berry to see what he thinks?

This would be an opportunity to ask him a few questions, so why not.

> > But everything is FSF and Debian free. How about adding a license
> > "mixed" or "fsf-free"? Or do you have a good suggestion?
> Yes, or we could just export the ‘license’ constructor from (guix
> licenses).  That would allow us to make a custom <license> objects when
> needed, like here.

Or we could leave it empty in some way; just call it "free"? It is clear 
that we will only package free software; so a license field that can only 
state "a collection of free licenses, for details, see the source" conveys 
really no information at all. So I do not see what to construct here. My 
suggestion:

(define fsf
  (license "fsf"
           "http://www.gnu.org/licenses/"
           "A collection of free licenses according to the FSF, see the 
source for details."))

> And the good thing is that now that you’ve done TeX Live and netpbm,
> you’ll find that Xorg is really piece of cake.  :-)

After looking at it, my impression is that at least the build process 
should be much easier (once the right order of installation determined).

> > (define-public texlive
> > 
> >   (package
> >   
> >    (name "texlive")
> >    (version "2012")
> Should be 20120701 no?

There is one edition per year, commonly refered to as "TeX Live 20YY"; so 
there is no reason to go into more datails.

>   (with-directory-excursion bin
>     (for-each symlink
>               '("pdftex" "pdftex" "xetex" "luatex" "luatex.1")
>               '("latex" "pdflatex" "xelatex" "lualatex" "lualatex.1")))

Very elegant, thanks for the suggestion! But actually, this manual symlink 
phase has become superfluous by some directoty related configure flags I 
just added.

> >              (mkdir "texlive-extra")
> >              (chdir "texlive-extra")
> >              (apply unpack (list #:source texlive-extra))
> >              (apply patch-source-shebangs (list #:source
> >              texlive-extra)) (system* "mv" "tlpkg" share)
> >              (chdir "../..")
> 
> When you have paired ‘cd foo’ and ‘cd ..’, you can instead use
> ‘with-directory-excursion’, as shown above.

Okay. Here it is less useful, since "unpack" changes directories, so a 
"chdir ".."" will remain in any case.

Andreas