Hello, In an attempt to verify whether bug 48064¹ (”texlive-* packages fail to build non-deterministically”) is fixed by the current TeX Live version, I’ve been working on updating it to version 2021.1².
Unfortunately I ran into a bootstrapping issue: texlive-latex-base now depends on texlive-latex-l3kernel, otherwise its build fails with: LaTeX2e <2020-10-01> patch level 4 ! LaTeX requires expl3. The problem is that if I add texlive-latex-l3kernel to the propagated- inputs list of texlive-latex-base, then a dependency loop is formed since texlive-latex-l3kernel uses the texlive-build-system, which adds texlive- latex-base as an implicit input. And if I understand thing correctly, l3kernel does indeed need some form of TeX or LaTeX in order to run `source/latex/l3kernel/l3.ins`. I tried to “cheat” and added the build argument `#:texlive-latex-base ,texlive-bin` to texlive-latex-l3kernel (since texlive-bin doesn’t depend on texlive-latex-base), but then I get an error about not being able to find `luatex.fmt`. Looking around the web, I found this answer: > To answer your question about deactivation ... the L3 programming layer > is part of the core LaTeX format since release 2019-10-01 and it can't be > deactivated. At the moment it is there to speed up processing of packages > written in expl3, e.g., xparse, fontspec, and many others, but going > forward core parts of LaTeX will make direct use of it. > > Deactivation is only possible by using a release prior to 2019-10 (even > rollback via "latexrelease" will load). — https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/538716 Does anyone have an idea how to break this dependency loop? Do we need to have a package definition for a pre-2019-10 version of LaTeX just to build texlive-latex-l3kernel, and then use that as a dependency for the actual texlive-latex-base package? The only alternative I can think of is trying to build a minimal version of 2021.1 LaTeX which somehow doesn’t use expl3 so that it can be used to build texlive-latex-l3kernel. But that is above my very superficial understanding of TeX and LaTeX. And the quote I pasted above doesn’t look very encouraging. If anyone wants to have a look at what I have so far, I pushed my patch to branch “bug-48064-texlive-2021” at https://gitlab.com/bauermann/guix . -- Thanks, Thiago ¹ https://issues.guix.gnu.org/48064 ² Well, almost. In order to have a stable URL to fetch from, I’m using the latest version available in the historic repository, which is slightly older than 2021.1.
