[Nix-dev] Re: Installing TeXLive

[Marc Weber]

On Thu, Oct 09, 2008 at 04:55:44PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Michael Raskin <7c6f434c at mail.ru> writes:
> 
> > It is non-trivial because of the need to maintain correct ls-R files
> > (and something else). So you will have to do some work done by TeXLive's
> > helpers manually, and in exactly the same way.. I didn't find courage in
> > myself to figure all that out (and to maintain it later).
> 
> Damn it.  The `ls-R' case is similar to Info's `dir' files (which list
> all currently available `.info' manuals).  In both cases, a great thing
> would be to have some sort of a hook invoked when `user-environment' is
> built so that these files can be updated, say, a
> `nix-support/user-environment-hook' script.  The downside is that it'd
> slow down the `user-environment' derivation.
> 
> Would that be a reasonable option?
Don't know.
I've already had an implementation. I can dig for it if you like.
I and kosmikus thought about using this to create a user ghc haskell package
database ocntaining all the libraries..

Right now I'm using an extra derivation to wrap all calls to
ghc{,-pkg,i} to add the GHC_PAKCAGES inv var which does the same job.
but this means that library derivation have to be instantiated again and
again even if only a small library is added. So I'm not sure which is
slower / faster in the end.

Marc