Texlive

[Federico Beffa <beffa@ieee.org>]

Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr> writes:

> Hello,
>
> the attached patch does what its commit message says. It is the fruit of many
> trials and discussions with Ludovic. The tricky thing was to link to the
> kpsewhich binary in texlive-bin, but to make it take its configuration file
> texmf.cnf from texlive-data. I ended up wrapping all binaries and providing
> them with the suitable value of TEXMFCNF.
>
> The real goal of the patch is to make it easy to create a second package
> texlive-small in a second step. This package shall inherit from texlive,
> but have as input texlive-texmf-small, which is created as texlive-texmf,
> but after deleting a big chunk of data; I would say, all the documentation
> and most of the fonts. Such a smaller package could be a native input for
> packages creating their documentation from a latex source, for instance.

If I understand correctly then the two packages, texlive and
texlive-small, will essentially be independent.

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 ...

This would be useful for packages with plug-ins, to bundle compilers with
a selection of libraries, ...

Regards,
Fede