Subject: Re: bug#26353: TeX Live

From: Ricardo Wurmus <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 02 Jun 2017 10:32:01 +0200

Ricardo Wurmus <[email-masked]> writes:

> Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> There are ways to turn it into a zillion packages from CTAN, which is
>> what Nixpkgs did.  Ricardo (I think?) had some thoughts as to how to
>> achieve this and I would really like to see it happen.
>
> Yeah, it’s true, I wanted to work on this, but … it hasn’t happened yet :)
> I’d be happy if someone could help us out here.

So… I already have a Texlive importer that fetches things from SVN
(because the tarballs on CTAN are not versioned).

The texmf-dist tarball actually seems to include a couple of generated
files (such as latex.ltx), which needs to be bootstrapped with initex
first.  I’ve already made some progress on this end, but I need to first
build a few metafont fonts.

The hardest part here is to override search paths and figure out
dependencies.  This is a very slow process right now, because it’s
mainly error-driven.

I’m close to finishing the bootstrap of latex-base.  Once that’s done I
should be able to finish the texlive-build-system, and then I’ll try
building the other latex packages that are distributed with Texlive.
There’s more to Texlive (e.g. xetex packages), but I’ll take care of
that later.

One thing that’s still unknown at this point is how the profile hook
should work, but I’ll figure this out as I learn more about the search
paths and the like.

--
Ricardo

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