Re: Texlive

[Federico Beffa <beffa@ieee.org>]

On Sun, Mar 15, 2015 at 11:48 AM, Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr> wrote:
>> It would be nice to have an incremental strategy with a hierarchy, say
>> texlive-base, texlive-common, texlive-extra, texlive-all, where each
>> package is non-overlapping with other ones. Then a new functionality to
>> aggregate packages into a new package where you specify which packages
>> to include. Something like
>> guix package --aggregate texlive --with texlive-base texlive-common ...
>
> I agree, but did not find a way of doing it. The problem with texlive is
> that part of the aggregation takes place in the install location (which for
> us would be the store).
>
> For instance, "mktexlsr" creates a file
>   /gnu/store/pvhfl19r2v7fn00g45jkv32n211bk90h-texlive-2014/share/texmf-dist/ls-R
> (after applying the patch), which contains the result of running "ls -R"
> inside the directory. This could be done inside the user profile, but not
> with the current setup, where
>   $HOME/.guix-profile/share/texmf-dist is a link to the store directory
> (which is a useful feature we added at some point in time, since it avoids
> the need for symlinking the thousands of files inside this directory tree),
> so that the ls-R file would be tried to be created in the store.

Just to clarify: the idea would be that the "--aggregate" command
would produce a new package in the store. The new in store package
would inherit the content of the "--with" packages, but with the
possibility to replace some parts (e.g. ls-R, ...) with the help of
some phase. The new parts would only be residing in the new aggregate
and the user would install the new aggregate instead of the other
individual parts.

I understand that this is currently not possible, but, from my point
of view, would be useful functionality for the future.

> My patch makes a first step by separating things better.

Sure it is!

Regards,
Fede