Subject: Re: bug#75893: texlive: kpathsea doesn't use ls-R database

From: vicvbcun <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Jan 2025 23:54:52 +0100

On 2025-01-30T23:27:29+0100, vicvbcun wrote
> [...]
>>>The comment above the substitution says that the !! construct wouldn't 
>>>work for texlive-build-system or when building profiles.  I don't know 
>>>if it would be possible to work around this but perhaps it could be 
>>>possible to work around this if installed in profile (or environment)?
>>
>>I don’t understand what you want to install in a profile. The ls-R file
>>is already built during profile generation. See "guix/profiles.scm".
>What I meant was that we could maybe use a horrible hack like somehow 
>overwriting texmf.cnf or wrapping the engines — anything to avoid 
>rebuilding the world.  But on a second thought, LaTeX should mostly be 
>a build time dependency so that grafting with a version capable of 
>handling both the build environment and being installed should work 
>well, right?  At least until the next TeX Live release.
Actually, on a third thought, the following cursed approach might work: 
Create a variant `texlive-libkpathsea/ls-R-authoritative' of 
`texlive-libkpathsea' with the only difference being !! in front of 
$TEXMFDIST in texmf.cnf and register it as a replacement for 
`texlive-libkpathsea'.  That way packages are built with the original, 
ungrafted version but when a user installs TeX Live packages they get 
the version for which the ls-R database is authoritative.

An issue with this would be that ungexp'ing a texlive-* package 
referencing `texlive-libkpathsea' should yield the grafted version so 
the profile hook would probably need to be changed.

vicvbcun