Re: documentation in TeX Live collections

[Emmanuel Beffara]

Hello,

Thanks for the instructive feedback!

De Nicolas Goaziou le 28/08/2023 à 13:01:
> Every texlive-* package comes with its documentation, in a separate
> output. "doc" output are not uncommon at all in Guix. Therefore,
> I disagree with the inconsistency you're talking about.

Ok, I admit I didn't investigate much before asserting that! I just observed
that most of the tools I use come with their man or info pages in the main
output and extrapolated from that.

> > I think it would make much more sense to have "doc" outputs also for
> > collections and schemes. It would be consistent with the structure of
> > individual packages and would not require artificial packages.
> 
> I disagree. Collections are meta-packages. There is no documentation,
> nor content, attached to them. Moreover Guix meta-packages do nothing
> special about the documentation of packages they propagate. This would
> be inconsistent.

I don't understand how "out" and "doc" are different in this respect. The
"out" output of a collection meta-package has no content of its own and it
only serves to gather the "out" outputs of its inputs. Similarly, the "doc"
output would have no content of its own and only gather the "doc" outputs of
its inputs. How is that inconsistent?

There may be something I misunderstand about how Guix packages work here.

> > Having individual package documentations in one's manifests is of course
> > doable but it is contradictory with the approach of collections.
> 
> How so?

The point of a collection is to bring a meaningful set of packages on a
general topic without having to worry about its specific contents: the exact
list of packages may evolve from one version to another, it may contain many
things that are indirectly required, etc. I think it makes sense to be able to
request such an collection of packages with its documentation, and that should
not involve listing all the packages individually.

I realise it could also be possible to program that with something like

    (map (lambda (p) (list p "doc"))
         (filter (lambda (p) (member "doc" (package-outputs p)))
                 (map cadr (package-transitive-inputs
                             texlive-scheme-medium))))

in the definition of a manifest but it feels a bit low-level. But it is nice
that doing this kind of thing possible, by the way!

> In any case, I suggest to write a proper bug report for this. Hopefully,
> someone with better understanding about the implications of GUIX_TEXMF
> will be able to solve this.

I can do that for the texdoc behaviour.

-- 
Emmanuel