Re: [PATCH] gnu: texlive: Fix 'texmf-local' search path.

[Andreas Enge]

Hello Fede,

apologies for not coming back to you earlier, I have little occasion to
work on Guix right now.

On Sun, Jun 12, 2016 at 10:56:40AM +0200, Federico Beffa wrote:
>                  (substitute* texmfcnf
>                    (("TEXMFROOT = \\$SELFAUTOPARENT")
> -                  (string-append "TEXMFROOT = " share)))
> +                   (string-append "TEXMFROOT = " share))
> +                  (("TEXMFLOCAL = \\$SELFAUTOGRANDPARENT/texmf-local")
> +                   "TEXMFLOCAL = $SELFAUTODIR/share/texmf-local")
> +                  (("!!\\$TEXMFLOCAL") "$TEXMFLOCAL"))

As said before, this change should be benign, but also without effect:
It still points to some place in the store, actually to the directory
   /gnu/store/...-texlive-2015/share/texmf-local ,
which does not exist.
If we keep it, for clarity I would use
   TEXMFLOCAL = $TEXMFROOT/texmf-local
(as for the other variables defined around it), and add a comment that this
declaration does not actually come into effect.

(Well, it _could_ be used by system administrators that define a local
variant of texlive with additional data in this subdirectory.)

I agree that this is a cleaner solution; maybe texmfcnf.lua needs to be
adapted as well?

We could also do something
> +   (native-search-paths
> +    (list (search-path-specification
> +            (variable "TEXMFLOCAL")
> +            (files '("share/texmf-local")))))

This seems to be the main goal of your patch: By redefining TEXMFLOCAL in the
profile, it will point to $HOME/.guix-profile/share/texmf-local. So if we add
packages to the distribution that put data there, it should be available to
texlive. Do you have an example package in mind? Does it work? Currently
I cannot test it on my machine.

There would be an alternative for people running Guix on top of another
distro: We could set TEXMFLOCAL to /usr/share/texmf; then system installed
texlive data could be used. This would work as long as the search path is
not overwritten by a Guix installed package (which we do not have so far).

Looking forward to some more discussion on the topic,

Andreas