bug#27217: texlive is too big

[Jelle Licht <jlicht@fsfe.org>]

Pierre Neidhardt <mail@ambrevar.xyz> writes:

> For posterity, here is a python importer for tlpdb:
>
> https://github.com/amaxwell/tlutility/blob/master/parse_tlpdb.py
>
> (Thanks to Henkjan for sharing this.)
>
> Jelle, did you work on the importer any further after FOSDEM?
> Can you share the file, I'm afraid I lost the link :p

As a matter of fact, I did! I am not at home with my guix-related work
right now. The short of it, is that I created a simple record type
(e.g. `tlpdb-package'). The tlpdb-parser we worked on at FOSDEM was able
to generate these structures from the tlpdb file, although translating
tlpdb-package records into actual guix packages was a step I did not
work on yet.

One of the problems I ran into was exactly what Ricardo described; the
fact that sources for texlive packages currently have a slight semantic
mismatch with what we have for most guix packages. If we have a solution
for this, the result of *any* of our importers would look a lot nicer.