Subject: Re: [bug#32428] [PATCH] gnu: mit-scheme: Use minimal texlive-union.

From: Ricardo Wurmus <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2018 16:20:04 +0200

Hi Ludo,

> Pierre Neidhardt <[email-masked]> skribis:
>
>> My limited understanding of this is that some TeXlive packages don't build the
>> fonts they need at install time, only at runtime.  I don't quite understand why
>> that is.
>>
>> It's not clear to me if it's possible to build these fonts in advance.
>
> Ricardo, do you have an idea about why ‘texlive-union’ fails to build
> fonts in advance?  Did we encounter this issue before?

I have an idea, but I haven’t been able to fix this.  This problem has
been around since the early days of using texlive-union.  It seems to me
that the TeX Live tools don’t know that the fonts are available.  This
is surprising because as far as I understand ’texlive-union’ sets up all
required environment variables and configuration files.

I discussed this with Andreas many months ago and thought that we had
pinned down the problem, but it turned out to be a dead end.  The idea
was to just set up more variables as the big texlive package does, but I
wasn’t able to convince the tools that they don’t need to rebuild the
fonts in HOME.

For other packages I was able to ignore this problem by setting HOME to
/tmp so that the tools can build the fonts cache as needed.

-- 
Ricardo