Subject: Re: bug#27296: [PATCH 35/35] guix: Add texlive importer.

From: Ricardo Wurmus <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2017 18:12:17 +0200

Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> writes:

>>> Any plans for an updater in that module?
>>
>> I wouldn’t know how.  Updates are done by changing the variables
>> %texlive-tag and %texlive-revision in (guix build-system texlive) and
>> then changing the package expressions.
>>
>> Since the version strings on CTAN differ from the revision of the TeX
>> Live SVN repo I don’t see how we can make this robust.  For most
>> packages we use the SVN revision.  This is much larger (“44445”) than
>> the version string for packages on CTAN (e.g. “2.6a”).
>
> I see.  Maybe something that updates the two %texlive-* variables and
> the hashes would already be helpful.  No idea how hard it would be.

Hmm.  I’ll add it to my TODO list.  Maybe I’ll have an idea.

> So how should we proceed now?  Should we gradually replace references to
> ‘texlive’ with ‘texlive-tiny’ or similar, and eventually remove
> ‘texlive’ and ‘texlive-texmf’ and rename ‘texlive-full’ to ‘texlive’?

Yes, it would be useful to find out what parts of texlive are needed by
the packages that currently use the big texlive package.  Then we can
package these things first and replace references to the “texlive”
package one by one.

Eventually, we should remove “texlive-texmf” and make “texlive” an alias
for “texlive-full”.  Packaging TeX Live things is pretty easy.  I’ll try
to create some more packages for that soon.

> Also, what should we do about ‘texlive-bin’?  Should it be built from
> svn sources as well?   Can it be split in smaller chunks?

I’m not sure about this.  I haven’t looked at texlive-bin closely
enough.  I’m not sure if it can be split up easily, but I know that it
can be made a little more modular.  For example, it bundles Lua 5.2,
which we should replace with our package.

-- 
Ricardo

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