Re: Question about packaging TexLive

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Nicolas Goaziou <mail@nicolasgoaziou.fr> writes:

>>> 2. Some affected packages are also missing propagated inputs (e.g.,
>>>    texlive-latex-graphics for texlive-latex-fncychap);
>>
>> Correct.  The old importer didn’t know about dependencies.  The newer
>> importer uses tlpdb to get a list of dependencies.
>
> AFAIU, this is not sufficient. All dependencies do not appear in
> "texlive.tlpbd". For example, `texlive-halloweenmath' has no "depend"
> entry in the tlpbd. Yet, it requires both texlive-amsmath and
> texlive-pict2e (i.e., "halloweenmath.sty" contains
> "\RequirePackage{amsmath,pict2e}").
>
> So, unless I'm mistaken, most dependencies have to be resolved manually.

Yes.  My point was that tlpdb contains some dependency information,
which is completely absent in those packages produced with the earlier
importer.

We should change the importer to scan the directory for RequirePackage
and the like.

>> All packages must be checked for completeness.  All new packages I’ve
>> added have been checked.  All old packages must be checked before
>> renaming them.  The way to check them is to build them and then check
>> the outputs with something like this:
>>
>> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
>> ,use (guix import texlive)
>> ,pp (files-differ? "/gnu/store/…-texlive-amsfonts-fixed-59745/share/" 
>> "amsfonts")
>> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
>>
>> This compares outputs with tlpdb.
>
> I use this valuable tool, but this is somewhat tedious. Could this
> become a test in the linter?

I don’t see why it could not.

>> Note that simple-texlive-package is far from perfect.  We have many
>> tex packages that require excessive workarounds to ensure that files end
>> up in the correct location and that superfluous files are removed.
>> simple-texlive-package should eventually take care of all of this, but I
>> haven’t been able to make time to work on it.
>
> We may need to update more Texlive packages to get a better grasp of the
> changes required in `simple-texlive-packages'.

A good example for the required changes is texlive-totpages or
texlive-soulutf8.  All these overrides to #:tex-directory and #:phases
are pretty common.  We usually need to add a chdir phase to change
directories to the sources and override the copy-files phase, because
otherwise it copies garbage.

This is the least I’d expect simple-texlive-packages to take care of.

-- 
Ricardo