Hello, Andreas Enge <andr...@enge.fr> writes:
> My workflow when updating Guix is as follows: > I have a local copy of the 4GB file texlive-20240312-texmf.tar.xz in my > home directory, which I put into the store with "guix download". Then > "guix shell -D texlive" creates the texlivetexmf package locally while > downloading the binaries from the substitute server, and > "guix build texlive" finishes the process. That’s tantamount to cheating! It is smart, but since Guix provides a `texlive' package, users are expected to be able to "guix install" it. They will have to retrieve the 4GB tarball first. > I tried texlive-scheme-full in the past, and it is not a real > alternative; as far as I remember, it took hours before I stopped it. > First of all, it needs to download the 4GB of data packages. Note that, theoretically, it shouldn’t download 4GB in the first place, because the largest part of it is documentation, living in separate outputs. Unfortunately, due to grafting, I think everything is pulled, which defeats having separate outputs. > A manageable alternative is to use "texlive-scheme-medium", plus a few > extra packages. When installing it, it fills the screen with hundreds of > lines of package names; and it takes quite a while: > real 21m39,704s > user 3m52,964s > sys 0m2,591s > This is although my download speed is somewhere between 2MB/s and > 3MB/s, so it is really the latency for the big number of packages that > poses problems. But it is comparable to building texlivetexmf from > source. In my case, to compile my sample document, I needed more > packages: texlive-biblatex texlive-biblatex-software (hello, Software > Heritage!) texlive-xurl texlive-todonotes texlive-pgfplots, but these > are determined easily as they are just packages included with \usepackage > that are not found, and the Guix package name is just > (string-append "texlive-" tex-package-name) > > So to conclude, I think using texlive-scheme-medium plus extra packages > is a real alternative, while texlive-scheme-full will never be one. > > Or is there something between texlive-scheme-medium and > texlive-scheme-full? > Or something smaller than texlive-scheme-medium that still fulfills most > use cases with a few (more) extra packages? > Or a collection of texlive-collection-* that provides a good user > experience (on their own, or with a texlive-scheme-something to start it > off)? FWIW, I think texlive-scheme-* packages are opinionated collections that have no other purpose than recreating past TeX distributions. One should only rely on texlive-collection-* packages. What collection to elect is another topic. If space is not an issue, and you don’t want to bother with optimized dependencies, texlive-collection-latexextra (1GB, around 1.4k packages) provides almost everything needed to compile LaTeX documents, including PGF/TikZ (no PSTricks, that’s in another collection). You may also want to add texlive-babel-XXX for non-English languages. Regards, -- Nicolas Goaziou
