Mathieu Lirzin <[email protected]> writes: > Ricardo Wurmus <[email protected]> writes: > >> What’s missing? >> >> Currently, one needs to set a lot of environment variables to use these >> separate packages. For “fastcap” I needed to set “DVIPSHEADERS” (to >> find “tex.pro”), “TFMFONTS” (for compiled metafont files), “TEXFORMATS” >> (for the compiled “latex.fmt”), and “TEXINPUTS” (for all directories >> containing tex source files). Setting these variables manually is >> really tedious. >> >> How can we set them automatically? A simple idea is to provide a >> procedure “texlive-union” that takes texlive packages and produces a >> wrapped variant of the tools in “texlive-bin” that run inside an >> environment where these variables are set. > > After reading, it is not clear to me why having all the environment > variables set in “~/.guix-profile/etc/profile” is not good enough, or > not possible?
IIRC the format of these variables is somewhat peculiar and does not correspond to the way environment variables are commonly specified, so we probably cannot use the search-path mechanism that Guix provides. (For example, there is syntax for indicating that a directory is supposed to be searched recursively.) Instead we would generate a configuration file that contains all of the environment variables and then only set the variables that are required to look up this configuration file. That’s roughly what “texlive-union” does. (It also builds a union directory, but we do this anyway when building profiles, so that’s nothing special.) -- Ricardo
