Re: [gentoo-dev] How to provide a recent TeXLive for Gentoo for our users?

[Alexis Ballier <aballier@gentoo.org>]

On Mon, 26 Mar 2018 11:57:49 +0200
Jonas Stein <jstein@gentoo.org> wrote:
> An installation via tlmgr provides many updates per day, but
> our distributed TeXLive is unfortunately always behind.
> Typically TeXLive on gentoo is 6-12 months behind upstream, because we
> have to bump a lot manually.

That is not the real reason. Most of it has been scripted for 10+ years.
The real reason is that we need to go through ~arch testing, fixing rev
deps that might need update to their .tex files because the underlying
packages they use has changed, adapt the deps for some potential
changes, and then a stablereq round. Following the yearly release cycle
leaves time for it to happen. It could move faster, but I don't see any
need for it as this would mean shortening stabilization cycles
potentially allowing for more bugs to enter stable and increasing the
load on arch teams.


[...]
> This is not a very nice solution, but it works so far. One difficulty
> is, that there is no 1:1 relation between the texlive distribution and
> dev-texlive/* at the moment.

There is a 1:1 relation.


> How can we enable our users to run a recent TeXLive in a clean way?

/usr/local/share/texmf has been supported by texlive on Gentoo from day
one. You can use that. It's an overlay that takes precedence on
anything else, so per the above, you lose all the QA & testing done
behind the scenes if you use this.


Alexis.