From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Federico Beffa Subject: Re: Texlive Date: Mon, 23 Mar 2015 12:06:26 +0100 Message-ID: References: <87a8zc51hv.fsf@gnu.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:34161) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1Ya0Bg-0000Of-H2 for guix-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 23 Mar 2015 07:06:29 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1Ya0Bf-0007Uo-Du for guix-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 23 Mar 2015 07:06:28 -0400 In-Reply-To: <87a8zc51hv.fsf@gnu.org> List-Id: "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org To: =?UTF-8?Q?Ludovic_Court=C3=A8s?= Cc: Guix-devel On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 5:51 PM, Ludovic Court=C3=A8s wrote: > I think the problem here is really that TeX Live is monolithic, and I > don=E2=80=99t think that should be addressed by the packaging tools thems= elves. 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=3D~/.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