From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr>
Subject: Re: prevent gc of texlive-...-texmf.tar.xz
Date: Sun, 23 Feb 2020 18:19:39 +0100
Message-ID: <20200223171939.GA8043@jurong>
References: <20200212.135345.176088053800652108.post@thomasdanckaert.be>
 <20200212204505.GB17839@jasmine.lan>
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To: Thomas Danckaert <post@thomasdanckaert.be>
Cc: help-guix@gnu.org

Hello,

On Thu, Feb 13, 2020 at 05:21:48PM +0100, Thomas Danckaert wrote:
> As far as I remember,
> updates to texlive often seem to require the original texmf tarball and
> apply patches to it (not sure how this works precisely -- somehow there are
> no substitutes for the patched/updated version of texlive-texmf?).

as to why this happens, here are the relevant lines of the package recipe
for texlive-texmf, an input to texlive:
   (arguments
    `(
      ;; This package takes 4 GiB, which we can't afford to distribute from
      ;; our servers.
      #:substitutable? #f

In fact, texlive-texmf is essentially a data package: its output is more or
less the same as the input tarball, with a bit of not very heavy processing
done in-between. So it helps our servers if users do not download the output
from us, but the input from the source servers, and then do the bit of
processing themselves.

Andreas