find and install a LaTeX package

find and install a LaTeX package

[Marco van Hulten]

Hi Guix—

I don't always find a LaTeX package on Guix, even if I know its name in
CTAN.

There is the package 'texlive', a complete TeX distribution.  I chose
to install 'texlive-base' plus a number of additional 'texlive-*'
packages instead.  But now it happens sometimes that a certain package
is not available; through ad hoc searching, and sometimes
trial-and-error, I manage to install the right Guix package and I can
compile my LaTeX document.  I have a couple of questions, hoping to
make this experience a bit more smooth.

* CTAN packages in Guix are sometimes named 'texlive-PACKAGE' and
  sometimes 'texlive-latex-PACKAGE'.  I find it hard to decide if
  something is LaTeX-specific, so should I search for something like
  'texlive*-PACKAGE'?
* Is 'texlive' really complete including all packages published on CTAN?
* If not, what *is* included in the full TeX Live distribution?

I suppose, if I invest a lot of time, I could try to understand CTAN
and also more of Guix, but I am hoping that there is a relatively "user
friendly" answer available.  I know a serious of effort is done to
improve the TeX Live situation significantly, but I'm still from time
to time at a loss to get a document compiled.

Thanks for pointers.

—Marco

Re: find and install a LaTeX package

[Andreas Enge]

Hello Marco,

On Wed, Sep 09, 2020 at 03:43:18PM +0200, Marco van Hulten wrote:
> * Is 'texlive' really complete including all packages published on CTAN?

I think so. The big "texlive" package is compiled from one big tarball
published by the TeXlive project. I am not sure what they put into it,
but I always thought it was all of CTAN.

If in doubt, if you have space and if you might need a random CTAN package
in offline situations, I would recommend the monolithic package. The other
ones are definitely less complete.

Andreas

Re: find and install a LaTeX package

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Marco van Hulten <marco@hulten.org> writes:

> * CTAN packages in Guix are sometimes named 'texlive-PACKAGE' and
>   sometimes 'texlive-latex-PACKAGE'.  I find it hard to decide if
>   something is LaTeX-specific, so should I search for something like
>   'texlive*-PACKAGE'?

Those named “texlive-{latex,generic,tex…}-PACKAGE” are old and are in
need of serious fixes.

Do not search for Guix package names.  Instead look at

    $(guix build texlive-bin)/share/tlpkg/texlive.tlpdb

and then deduce the name of the Guix package.

-- 
Ricardo

Re: find and install a LaTeX package

[Marco van Hulten]

On  9 Sep 21:43 Andreas Enge wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 09, 2020 at 03:43:18PM +0200, Marco van Hulten wrote:
> > * Is 'texlive' really complete including all packages published on CTAN?  
> 
> I think so. The big "texlive" package is compiled from one big tarball
> published by the TeXlive project. I am not sure what they put into it,
> but I always thought it was all of CTAN.
> 
> If in doubt, if you have space and if you might need a random CTAN package
> in offline situations, I would recommend the monolithic package. The other
> ones are definitely less complete.

Great, I'll do that for now.

On  9 Sep 22:02 Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
> Marco van Hulten <marco@hulten.org> writes:
> 
> > * CTAN packages in Guix are sometimes named 'texlive-PACKAGE' and
> >   sometimes 'texlive-latex-PACKAGE'.  I find it hard to decide if
> >   something is LaTeX-specific, so should I search for something like
> >   'texlive*-PACKAGE'?  
> 
> Those named “texlive-{latex,generic,tex…}-PACKAGE” are old and are in
> need of serious fixes.
> 
> Do not search for Guix package names.  Instead look at
> 
>     $(guix build texlive-bin)/share/tlpkg/texlive.tlpdb
> 
> and then deduce the name of the Guix package.

I did find out that instead of mhchem I can use chemmacros that popped
up in the output from this command.  But then I did 'guix package -s
chemmacros' (I suppose a stupid way to deduce the name of the Guix
package, but I suppose the name won't be hashed or something and thus
this should work), but no package came up.

Because of other issues and lack of time, I'll compile the document on
a different system.

—Marco