Dear all,

there was a question on the tex@gentoo ml from a user, who needs a very
recent TeXLive in order to be compatible with other setups.
This is also very important, for users of the more recent programs like
lualatex. Many packages do not work properly in the unfixed old version.

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.

One solution would be more powerful scripts, which update the TeX
ebuilds, but the ticket is open since 2005.
https://bugs.gentoo.org/85411

On one Gentoo system I installed therefor TeXLive via tlmgr and added
all provided packages in package.provided like this:

/etc/portage/profile/package.provided/texlive.provided
[..]
dev-tex/xcolor-9999
dev-tex/latexdiff-9999
dev-tex/glossaries-9999
dev-tex/biblatex-9999
dev-tex/biber-9999
dev-tex/bibtexu-9999
app-text/texlive-core-9999

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.

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

Ideas are welcome.

-- 
Best,
Jonas