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
