Subject: bug#27217: texlive is too big

From: Pierre Neidhardt <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 Mar 2019 13:59:16 +0100

Hello people!

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.

@Jelle: see the nice "match"? :D

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.

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!

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/