Heime <[email protected]> writes: > On Friday, May 15th, 2026 at 8:56 PM, Nicolas Goaziou > <[email protected]> wrote:
>> However I strongly discourage from installing `texlive-scheme-full'. >> I don’t know your use case but you probably do not need at least >> 80% of the packages it provides (e.g., I assume you don’t write >> a thesis for 60 universities across the world). > > If the current distribution strategy for TeX Live is indeed as > described, the people at texlive have really lost the plot. A > departure from a user-centric design that fails to provide a > stable, foundational release creates substantial hurdles for > users attempting to establish a functional environment. > > The influence of academic and institutional priorities, has > complicated the installation process to the point of frustration, > effectively obscuring the primary goal of providing a reliable > typesetting system. User-centric design is difficult to achieve when user needs can widely vary. In any case, TeX Live (and therefore Guix) provides different ways to obtain a reliable typesetting system. None of them is difficult to follow. - You can install a single package and forget about it, like you already do; - You can choose a reasonable set of "collections" and occasionally install manually a package you’re missing out. For example, since you are a Lua(La)TeX user, installing texlive-collection-luatex, texlive-collection-latexrecommended, and texlive-collection-pictures (for PGF/TikZ) is a good start. - You can select only a couple of low level collections and only install individual packages you really need. It depends on your needs and the time on your hands. >> Instead, I suggest to select a few so-called collections of packages >> you may be interested in, such as `texlive-collection-latexrecommended', >> and possibly add some dependencies manually (in particular those >> coming from "latexextra" collection, which is huge) when compilation >> asks about them. At some point your setup will stabilize and you will >> end up managing Mo instead of Go of TeX packages. > > Is the selection via Guix? Of course. You can choose the granularity of your TeX Live installation. You can install a scheme, such as texlive-scheme-medium, collections, such as texlive-collection-pictures, and individual packages. And you can mix all of those. Or you can install the 4k+ packages from texlive-scheme-full, which is a no-brainer but could also be a waste (of bandwidth, disk space…). Regards,
