Re: [core-updates] texlive 2021 bootstrap problem

[Maxim Cournoyer]

Hello Thiago,

Thiago Jung Bauermann <bauermann@kolabnow.com> writes:

[...]

> I decided to ask on the TeX Live mailing list about the bootstrap problem¹ 
> (not sure why this didn’t occur to me earlier). It turns out it’s not a 
> real circular dependency, it just appears so because of Guix packaging.
>
> It’s possible to build texlive-latex-l3kernel with IniTeX (i.e., by calling 
> `pdftex -ini` or `tex -ini`) and docstrip, without any format loaded.

It was worth it to ask :-).

> So I made some changes to texlive-build-system to that, and it worked. By 
> which I mean: the texlive-latex-l3kernel package builds, and the texlive-
> latex-base build is attempted and fails in the same way as it was failing
> when I sent the last email, when generating latex formats. I think I’m 
> missing some file(s) with definitions for LaTeX macros, but I don’t know yet.
>
> I pushed a new branch “bug-48064-texlive-2021-l3kernel-initex” to my GitLab 
> repo at https://gitlab.com/bauermann/guix.git with two patches implementing 
> the new approach.

I had a cursory look at the commits; they look good to me!  And the
commit messages are very useful in understanding the hows and whys.
Make sure to send them to guix-patches@gnu.org after you are satisfied
with the result!

Happy hacking,

Maxim