Subject: Re: bug#64852: Texlive errors and weird behavior

From: Nicolas Goaziou <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2023 16:45:42 +0200

Hello,

Wojtek Kosior via Bug reports for GNU Guix <[email-masked]> writes:

> I'm having some problems using texlive after the recent tex-team merge.
> On my system (with texlive installed in a profile, together with many
> other packages) the tools complain about 'lualatex.fmt', 'pdflatex.fmt',
> etc. missing. Before the merge I have been using texlive without ever
> experiencing such problems.

These files are provided by the `texlive-latex-bin' package. Your
profile should probably contain `texlive-collection-latex' to get it
along with some very important LaTeX packages.

Would you want to share the TeX Live packages you listed in your
profile?

> I tried to reduce it to a small, reproducible example using
> `guix shell -C`. Surprisingly, now I managed to compile this document
> inside a container. But also surprisingly, it took very long to do so.
> Also, lualatex automatically created a directory named '{' in the
> current working directory.

These two issues were reported in another bug report. Unfortunately, at
the moment, I do not know where they do come from.

Concerning the second issue, the "{" directory, I do know that
monolithic TeX Live modifies "texmfcnf.lua" (see `texlive-texmf'
package) whereas modular TeX Live (in `texlive-luatex' package) doesn't.

I think this "texmfcnf.lua" file should be modified in a proper way to
fix this issue, but I don't know how.

Regards,
-- 
Nicolas Goaziou