bug#64729: xelatex is broken, because xelatex.fmt is missing

[Nicolas Goaziou <mail@nicolasgoaziou.fr>]

Hello,

Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> writes:

> Since the merge of the tex-team-next branch earlier this week xelatex is
> broken.

For the record, I can compile some simple documents with it, such as the
following "test.tex" file

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
 
\setmainfont{DejaVu Sans}
\title{Sample font document}
\author{Overleaf}
\date{\today}
   
\begin{document}
\maketitle
     
This is an \textit{example} of a document compiled 
with \textbf{XeLaTeX}. LuaLaTeX should also work too.

\end{document}
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

with the command

   guix shell --pure texlive-collection-basic texlive-fontspec texlive-xetex \
   font-dejavu -- xelatex test.tex

> I tried installing different collection packages, but I cannot
> find any package providing the xelatex.fmt file.

This format file is provided by `texlive-xetex' package (and
consequently texlive-collection-xetex).

> This also affects packages like python-nbconvert, which now has a
> failing test suite as it can no longer build PDFs with xelatex.

I added a couple of packages to python-nbconvert's inputs, including
texlive-xetex. It fixed the build.

What surprises me however, is that one of these packages, namely
texlive-pdfcol, had to be packaged in Guix in the process. Was
python-nbconvert even building before the tex-team-next merge?

Thanks for the report! Closing.

Regards,
-- 
Nicolas Goaziou