On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 5:51 PM, Ludovic Courtès <l...@gnu.org> wrote:
> I think the problem here is really that TeX Live is monolithic, and I > don’t think that should be addressed by the packaging tools themselves. The main TeX Live installer may make it look like it is monolithic, but it isn't monolithic at all. It is very configurable and every user can add his own classes, fonts, packages, ... wherever he wants even using central installations on traditional UNIX systems. TeX Live has its own management tool 'tlmgr', but underneath it makes use of established Web2C tools. As one example, setting export TEXINPUTS=~/.guix-profile/share/texmf: all the files in the personal profile would be found (on top of the ones in the central installation configuration files). You can even specify if you want to make use of files databases (ls-R), or not (and that for each directory tree individually). See, e.g., http://tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#x1-540007 Making the various TeX tools find components (classes, fonts, ...) in "extra" store locations may be tricky, but making it find them once installed in a user profile should be easy. Maybe finding files in "extra" store directories could be achieved by making use of variables expansion, something like "!!/gnu/store//share/texmf" (note the double slash and exclamation marks), in the central configuration file. (See above document.) I think that working out the proper way to install it on Guix may be tricky, but, given the flexibility, a good hierarchical solution should be possible. Regards, Fede