bug#27217: texlive is too big

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello!

Pierre Neidhardt <address@hidden> skribis:

> Yesterday Jelle and I started getting down to it.
>
> I've created a wip-texlive branch.  For now, we can run
>
>   (texlive-fetch "xcolor") 
>
> and it returns the appropriate parsed entry from the tlpdb from texlive-bin.

Nice!

> The first call to texlive-fetch takes some 10-30 seconds because the tlpdb is
> some 11MB+ big.
>
> I'm caching the parsed DB, so that should not be a problem during development.

You can use ‘http-fetch/cached’, if that’s not what you’re already
doing.

> I'm suggesting those following steps:
>
> - Write the package definition generator.  We can take inspiration from
>   opam.scm, it seems to be well written and very similar.
>   `texlive-fetch' is already aligned with `opam-fetch'.
>   
>   For testing, we can try to recreate a simple package definition.
>   texlive-latex-xcolor for instance.
>   There is an immediate difference already: the name generated by the importer
>   will be texlive-xcolor and not texlive-latex-xcolor.
>
> - Write texlive-fetch so that we can write definitions with multiple
>   directories.
>   
> - Update the texlive-build-system to accommodate the importer.  For instance, 
> we
>   will probably have to build fonts automatically.  We will also have to be
>   smart about the files that need to be generated, and those that need to be 
> discarded.
>
> - Write an updater (again, following opam.scm, should be trivial).
>
> I'll get started with the first step today.  Let me know what you think!

So TeX Live packages would use ‘texlive-fetch’ instead of ‘svn-fetch’ or
similar, right?

If that’s the case, then merely computing the derivation of one of these
would require fetching the tldb database, which would be problematic.
Is this correct?

Thank you,
Ludo’.