Re: prevent gc of texlive-...-texmf.tar.xz

[Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr>]

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