Hello, On Thu, Feb 13, 2020 at 05:21:48PM +0100, Thomas Danckaert wrote: > As far as I remember, > updates to texlive often seem to require the original texmf tarball and > apply patches to it (not sure how this works precisely -- somehow there are > no substitutes for the patched/updated version of texlive-texmf?).
as to why this happens, here are the relevant lines of the package recipe for texlive-texmf, an input to texlive: (arguments `( ;; This package takes 4 GiB, which we can't afford to distribute from ;; our servers. #:substitutable? #f In fact, texlive-texmf is essentially a data package: its output is more or less the same as the input tarball, with a bit of not very heavy processing done in-between. So it helps our servers if users do not download the output from us, but the input from the source servers, and then do the bit of processing themselves. Andreas