Re: texlive-build-system: phase `build' failed

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi Pierre,

> I'm working on a bunch of TeXlive packages and I keep running into a few
> issues.

Thank you for giving this a try!  Working on TeXlive packages has been
the most frustrating experience for me.

> 1. Does anyone know how to search for the path of a package in TeXlive's
> tree without checking out the whole SVN repo?
> http://www.tug.org/svn/texlive/tags/texlive-2017.1/ is not so convenient
> to browse.

I actually downloaded the whole SVN repository.  It is not organised in
a consistent way, so it’s difficult to find the correct directory in all
cases.

> 2. Are the package dependencies documented?  For instance
> https://www.ctan.org/pkg/needspace requires microtype to build properly,
> but that does not seem to be mentioned anywhere on CTAN.

Sometimes they are documented.  Often they are not.  If the importer
(which would check https://ctan.org/xml/1.2/pkg/needspace) doesn’t show
you anything, then this information can only be inferred from the .ins
files.

> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
> [...]
> starting phase `build'
> This is LuaTeX, Version 1.0.4 (TeX Live 2017)
>  restricted system commands enabled.
> phase `build' failed after 1.7 seconds
> [...]
> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

If you want to get more verbose output you need to override
“"-interaction=batchmode"” with “"-interaction=nonstopmode"” in
“compile-with-latex” in “(guix build texlive-build-system)”.

Unfortunately, there is no convenient switch in the
texlive-build-system to control this.  Changing the texlive-build-system
requires a rebuild of *all* these packages, but usually this doesn’t
take a long time.

--
Ricardo