Subject: bug#56556: texlive-babel-dutch with and without texlive-hyphen-dutch: No hyphenation patterns were preloaded

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 07 Apr 2023 12:33:41 +0200

Hello Josselin and all,

I was just bitten by the infamous:

  Package babel Warning: No hyphenation patterns were preloaded for
  […]

That’s a real issue because it makes modular TeX Live pretty much
unusable for languages other than English.

Josselin Poiret <[email-masked]> skribis:

>> Thirdly, formats are apparently not handled right. The main issue is with
>> hyphenation (hence the cc on an open issue): hyphenation patterns need to be
>> compiled into the formats to be available in documents, so the format files
>> should be built depending on which `texlive-hyphen-something` packages are
>> installed. Currently this is not the case:
>>
>> ```
>> $ guix shell --pure coreutils texlive-base texlive-latex-base -- /bin/sh -c 'realpath $GUIX_TEXMF/web2c/pdflatex.fmt'
>> /gnu/store/m1vh5mm4gjlqzaylfxmxbx5g3j20k8wn-texlive-latex-base-59745/share/texmf-dist/web2c/pdflatex.fmt
>> $ guix shell --pure coreutils texlive-base texlive-latex-base texlive-hyphen-base texlive-hyphen-french -- /bin/sh -c 'realpath $GUIX_TEXMF/web2c/pdflatex.fmt'
>> /gnu/store/m1vh5mm4gjlqzaylfxmxbx5g3j20k8wn-texlive-latex-base-59745/share/texmf-dist/web2c/pdflatex.fmt
>> ```
>>
>> If the format is always the same, then no modular installation can do any
>> hyphenation, as reported in https://issues.guix.gnu.org/56556. There might be
>> other things than hyphenation that require similar treatment.
>
> I don't really know how we could fix this: maybe build the formats with
> all the hyphenation packages enabled?

The intertubes suggest running ‘fmtutil --all’ to get hyphenations
packages straight.  Is this something we should do in the TeX Live
profile hook for example?

Emmanuel, is this what you had in mind when you wrote about compilation
of hyphenation patterns above?

(Cc’ing Maxim who has experience with TeX Live.)

Thanks,
Ludo’.