Re: Question about packaging TexLive

[Nicolas Goaziou]

Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> writes:

> Nicolas Goaziou <mail@nicolasgoaziou.fr> writes:
>
>> 1. "#:trivial? #t" means we're giving up generating ".sty" files from
>>    source;
>
> Trivial should only ever be used for packages where there aren’t any
> sources to build from.

We are on the same length.

However, some packages do use "#:trivial #t" even though they should
not, e.g., `texlive-latex-marginfix'. My point is that we should not
make "#:trivial #t" the default, assuming that was a possibility
stemming from Simon's question.

>> 2. Some affected packages are also missing propagated inputs (e.g.,
>>    texlive-latex-graphics for texlive-latex-fncychap);
>
> Correct.  The old importer didn’t know about dependencies.  The newer
> importer uses tlpdb to get a list of dependencies.

AFAIU, this is not sufficient. All dependencies do not appear in
"texlive.tlpbd". For example, `texlive-halloweenmath' has no "depend"
entry in the tlpbd. Yet, it requires both texlive-amsmath and
texlive-pict2e (i.e., "halloweenmath.sty" contains
"\RequirePackage{amsmath,pict2e}").

So, unless I'm mistaken, most dependencies have to be resolved manually.

> All packages must be checked for completeness.  All new packages I’ve
> added have been checked.  All old packages must be checked before
> renaming them.  The way to check them is to build them and then check
> the outputs with something like this:
>
> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
> ,use (guix import texlive)
> ,pp (files-differ? "/gnu/store/…-texlive-amsfonts-fixed-59745/share/" 
> "amsfonts")
> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
>
> This compares outputs with tlpdb.

I use this valuable tool, but this is somewhat tedious. Could this
become a test in the linter?

> Note that simple-texlive-package is far from perfect.  We have many
> tex packages that require excessive workarounds to ensure that files end
> up in the correct location and that superfluous files are removed.
> simple-texlive-package should eventually take care of all of this, but I
> haven’t been able to make time to work on it.

We may need to update more Texlive packages to get a better grasp of the
changes required in `simple-texlive-packages'. When doing such updates,
I mostly copy and paste definition from previously updated packages,
which is a good thing. However, some translations seem complicated.

> All this work should be done on a separate feature branch.

Agreed.

Regards,