On Tue, Oct 22, 2019 at 10:04:26AM +0200, Pierre Neidhardt wrote:
> Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> writes:
> 
> > This does not contradict what I wrote.  *Building* the packages differs
> > from just copying the generated files to their expected locations.  I
> > doubt Nix actually generates all these files from source.
> 
> Indeed.  We discussed this some time back: we can come up with a build
> system / importer that tries to generate the file the best it can, and
> if it fails to produce the expected output, we can fallback on copying
> the SVN files.  Not ideal, but better than what we have now ;)
> 

TeX is like black magic to me. The only thing I have to add is that
Debian "compiles" (or however it works) as a post-install hook, and they
have a DD who also works on TeX itself. However, as a binary
distribution, they have no incentive to break it up into smaller pieces.
Gentoo might be better with that, but I have no idea.


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Efraim Flashner   <efraim@flashner.co.il>   אפרים פלשנר
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