Subject: [bug#67660] [PATCH] gnu: texlive-xiften: Readd need input propagation

From: Isaac van Bakel <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 7 Dec 2023 12:06:09 +0100

Hello,

On 2023/12/06 22:39, Nicolas Goaziou wrote:
> This is a limitation in TeX Live, not Guix's, package definitions. The
> dependency is not reported in their "texlive.tlpdb" file.
>
> Note there are hundreds of such issues. We cannot realistically fix them
> manually ; for example this change would need to be tested every time
> Guix TeX packages are updated.

Is there no way to declare that a package auto-generated from TeX Live 
should be "patched" in some way (in this case, to include the 
dependency)? I'm aware that Nix does something like this for their 
various package sets. Perhaps this would be more sustainable than a 
fully-manual process.

> I suggest to use collections of packages to avoid messing too much with
> individual dependencies, and possibly report those missing dependencies
> to the TeX Live project.

Unfortunately this particular package only appears in an unopinionated 
collection in latexextra, which is very heavy for something that I have 
to put in my manifest just to fix a dependency issue.

I'll look into getting the dependency registered on TL, but it's worth 
noting that they also don't want the responsibility of dependency 
tracking. They also don't recommend that package authors bother to put 
dependency information in their packages.[0] I'm conscious that this is 
a complex burden, but ideally *someone* would take it on so that the 
software works.

Best,

Isaac

  [0]: https://tug.org/texlive/pkgcontrib.html#deps