TeXLive modular ebuilds ready(?) for the main portage tree

For those who do not read -dev ml and might be interested in testing / helping:

As some of you may or may not know, I’ve been working on modular texlive ebuilds[1], based on work found on b.g.o and pclouds work [2]. I wanted to send a mail earlier but time was lacking to fix the few remaining bugs.

I’ve had several success reports, and fixed the remaining (known) bugs there. I was thinking that it might be time to integrate this to the official tree, as a first shoot under package.mask.

The layout I’ve been using is a modular one:
– texlive-core package that builds the required binaries. That’s the only one that should be system dependant.
– several texmf modules based on upstream “collection”s (that’s how they call them) that agregates packages from CTAN in some more or less independant categories.

I’ve tried to remove as much as possible programs from the -core package, as long as they had their independant ebuilds equivalent and added the independant packages as dependencies of the texlive meta ebuild.

As you might guess it, having a modular layout can give dependencies problems. I was thinking about adding some (new style) virtuals to handle them :
– virtual/tex-base : programs that need only standard tex binaries or libraires (like kpathsea) but do not need it to compile latex files for example. There are a very very few of such packages and are ok with the next virtual, so I dunno if that one is really necessary, apart for reducing deps to the minimal set.
– virtual/latex-base : packages that need a (basic) latex, for example to compile their documentation. This virtual will help preventing from having circular dependencies between ebuilds (esp. the meta ebuild and its dependencies)
– virtual/latex-full : a full latex distribution installation, what other tex distributions like tetex provide. This one can use the current old style virtual (virtual/tetex) instead of being a new one, but the name is better imho.
So in the end, only latex-base is strictly required to merge this. tex-base and latex-full have their improvements but can benefit from discussion here.

Everything in [1] could still benefit of any kind of reviewing, especially the eclasses. I’ll also need to write a more decent guide on how to use/switch to those ebuilds, so that it can be put on the website.

The only (known) bug still left so far is that metapost (mpost) isn’t useable on hardened kernel, it gets killed. It is not a regression from tetex, but apparently nobody ever noticed that. Now that ebuilds generate the format files themselves in src_compile (this way we can improve QA imho), instead of having texmf-update doing it in pkg_postinst, some ebuilds will fail to install instead of silently not creating the format file. (though texmf-update will still recreate the formats so that they get updated with the texmf tree)
Something that annoys me is the license : there is [3], [4] and [5], so GPL-2 might probably be fine, but I’m definitely not a lawyer…

In the (very hypothetic) case where nobody would have anything to add there, I’ll start merging this to the main tree, but definitely not until the next week as I’ll be away from wednesday to sunday.

And of course, many thanks to all the people who helped there: the early testers when documentation was lacking but not bugs, the people who suggested improvements (be it to ebuilds, the packaging layout or documentation), bug fixes, reported bugs, or just mailed me about a successful installation.

Now a question to arch teams : Should I keyword this for systems I’ve tested it or just add without keywords and let you do another layer of checks ? I’ve been using it on ~x86 (and hardenend but mpost had problems), ~amd64 and ~ppc64 (this one has some missing deps, but don’t worry I’ll poke you as soon as I’ll have done extra checks 😉 ).

As a side note, I’ll have to send 1.3k+ files to distfiles-local as upstream does not provide versionned names of the source files, for a total of ~700-800M. Since this is huge, I hope infra has no particular objection to it.

[1] http://overlays.gentoo.org/dev/aballier/
[2] http://dev.gentoo.org/~pclouds/texlive/overlay/
[3] http://www.tug.org/svn/texlive/trunk/Master/LICENSE.TL?view=markup
[4] http://www.tug.org/svn/texlive/trunk/Master/LICENSE.CTAN?view=markup
[5] http://www.tug.org/texlive/copying.html