Re: documentation in TeX Live collections

[Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr>]

Hello,

Am Mon, Aug 28, 2023 at 06:54:35PM +0200 schrieb Nicolas Goaziou:
> Emmanuel Beffara <manu@beffara.org> writes:
> > I don't understand how "out" and "doc" are different in this respect. The
> > "out" output of a collection meta-package has no content of its own and it
> > only serves to gather the "out" outputs of its inputs. Similarly, the "doc"
> > output would have no content of its own and only gather the "doc" outputs of
> > its inputs. How is that inconsistent?
> >
> Outputs are used to split files to be installed after building
> a package. Since meta-packages do not build anything, there is nothing
> to install, and therefore, to split. The default output is enough.

if I understand things correctly, we would like the following behaviour
for propagated inputs in the texlive context:
We have these metapackages with propagated inputs; all of these inputs
have "out" and "doc". Then we would like to automatically create "out"
and "doc" for the metapackage, into which the corresponding "out" and
"doc" of their "ingredients" are propagated.

Well, more precisely, the metapackages are empty, so it is a bit fuzzy
what I mean by "into which" above.

We would like the following:
- If a user installs metapackage:out, they get all the ingredient:out
  in their profile.
- If a user installs metapackage:doc, they get all the ingredient:doc
  in their profile.
I am quite certain this is not how propagated inputs work, and I do not
know whether their behaviour could be changed in this way.

The documentation is a bit unclear:
   https://guix.gnu.org/de/manual/devel/en/guix.html#package_002dpropagated_002dinputs
"propagated-inputs is similar to inputs, but the specified packages will be automatically installed to profiles"
What is a "package" in this context? I think it means all outputs of
a package. But then we should already have all the documentation with
the metapackages, right? And indeed, when installing texlive-scheme-medium
into my profile, I have lots of downloads such as
 texlive-tex-ini-files-66594  3KiB                                   452KiB/s 00:00 ▕██████████████████▏ 100.0%
 texlive-tex-ini-files-66594-doc  1KiB                               257KiB/s 00:00 ▕██████████████████▏ 100.0%
(every package twice with its -doc).
So as a first observation, separating the doc output serves no purpose:
it will be downloaded anyway, and actually forms the bulk of the whole
texmf-dist. The above package is not typical in this respect, here is
another one:
 texlive-upmendex-66594  77B                                          33KiB/s 00:00 ▕██████████████████▏ 100.0%
 texlive-upmendex-66594-doc  945KiB                                  2.0MiB/s 00:00 ▕██████████████████▏ 100.0%

But strangely, $HOME/.guix-profile/share/texmf-dist/doc is just a pointer to
   /gnu/store/a184f1m1mbwkccxyi86dn4mdamay6lw5-texlive-bin-20230313/share/texmf-dist/doc

However, the doc output of texlive-tex-ini-files has a share/temxf-dist/doc
with a subdirectory generic/, which thus does not appear in the profile.

See also
   https://issues.guix.gnu.org/65550

I do not really understand what is happening. All outputs are downloaded,
but only the out outputs are propagated?

If this is true, then I think it would make sense to not split into two
outputs, but to always include the documentation in the texlive packages.

Andreas

PS: Something else that is strange: I end up with
    $HOME/.guix-profile/share/texmf (without the -dist suffix) that points to
    /gnu/store/lzq5fd5b2l3341s0da5a1vzhxc1li3yb-asymptote-2.86/share/texmf