Re: Texlive

[Federico Beffa <beffa@ieee.org>]

On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 5:51 PM, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:

> I think the problem here is really that TeX Live is monolithic, and I
> don’t think that should be addressed by the packaging tools themselves.

The main TeX Live installer may make it look like it is monolithic,
but it isn't monolithic at all. It is very configurable and every user
can add his own classes, fonts, packages, ... wherever he wants even
using central installations on traditional UNIX systems. TeX Live has
its own management tool 'tlmgr', but underneath it makes use of
established Web2C tools.

As one example, setting
export TEXINPUTS=~/.guix-profile/share/texmf:

all the files in the personal profile would be found (on top of the
ones in the central installation configuration files). You can even
specify if you want to make use of files databases (ls-R), or not (and
that for each directory tree individually). See, e.g.,

http://tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#x1-540007

Making the various TeX tools find components (classes, fonts, ...) in
"extra" store locations may be tricky, but making it find them once
installed in a user profile should be easy.

Maybe finding files in "extra" store directories could be achieved by
making use of variables expansion, something like
"!!/gnu/store//share/texmf" (note the double slash and exclamation
marks), in the central configuration file. (See above document.)

I think that working out the proper way to install it on Guix may be
tricky, but, given the flexibility, a good hierarchical solution
should be possible.

Regards,
Fede