Ricardo Wurmus <rek...@elephly.net> writes: > Ludovic Courtès <l...@gnu.org> writes: > >> There are ways to turn it into a zillion packages from CTAN, which is >> what Nixpkgs did. Ricardo (I think?) had some thoughts as to how to >> achieve this and I would really like to see it happen. > > Yeah, it’s true, I wanted to work on this, but … it hasn’t happened yet :) > I’d be happy if someone could help us out here.
So… I already have a Texlive importer that fetches things from SVN (because the tarballs on CTAN are not versioned). The texmf-dist tarball actually seems to include a couple of generated files (such as latex.ltx), which needs to be bootstrapped with initex first. I’ve already made some progress on this end, but I need to first build a few metafont fonts. The hardest part here is to override search paths and figure out dependencies. This is a very slow process right now, because it’s mainly error-driven. I’m close to finishing the bootstrap of latex-base. Once that’s done I should be able to finish the texlive-build-system, and then I’ll try building the other latex packages that are distributed with Texlive. There’s more to Texlive (e.g. xetex packages), but I’ll take care of that later. One thing that’s still unknown at this point is how the profile hook should work, but I’ll figure this out as I learn more about the search paths and the like. -- Ricardo GPG: BCA6 89B6 3655 3801 C3C6 2150 197A 5888 235F ACAC https://elephly.net
