nixpkgs/pkgs/tools/typesetting/tex/texlive/UPGRADING.md
Dmitry Kalinkin d9fb53ddd6
texlive: reimplement fixHashes.sh in GNU Awk
The shell script doesn't work very well in non-GNU environments like
darwin. This provides an implementation that uses just a single GNU tool
- gawk, thus reduces number of points of failure.
2020-03-15 14:56:16 -04:00

2.3 KiB

Notes on maintaining/upgrading

Upgrading texlive.bin

texlive contains a few binaries, defined in bin.nix and released once a year.

In order to reduce closure size for users who just need a few of them, we split it into packages such as core, core-big, xvdi, etc. This requires making assumptions about dependencies between the projects that may change between releases; if you upgrade you may have to do some work here.

Updating the package set

texlive contains several thousand packages from CTAN, defined in pkgs.nix.

The CTAN mirrors are not version-controlled and continuously moving, with more than 100 updates per month.

To create a consistent and reproducible package set in nixpkgs, we snapshot CTAN and generate nix expressions for all packages in texlive at that point.

We mirror CTAN sources of this snapshot on community-operated servers and on IPFS.

To upgrade the package snapshot, follow this process:

Snapshot sources and texlive package database

Mirror the current CTAN archive to our mirror(s) and IPFS (URLs in default.nix). See https://tug.org/texlive/acquire-mirror.html for instructions.

Upgrade package information from texlive package database

curl -L http://mirror.ctan.org/tex-archive/systems/texlive/tlnet/tlpkg/texlive.tlpdb.xz \
         | xzcat | uniq -u | sed -rn -f ./tl2nix.sed > ./pkgs.nix

This will download a current snapshot of the CTAN package database texlive.tlpdb.xz and regenerate all of the sha512 hashes for the current upstream distribution in pkgs.nix.

Build packages locally and generate fix hashes

To save disk space and prevent unnecessary rebuilds, texlive packages are built as fixed-output derivations whose hashes are contained in fixedHashes.nix.

Updating the list of fixed hashes requires a local build of all packages, which is a resource-intensive process:

# move fixedHashes away, otherwise build will fail on updated packages
mv fixedHashes.nix fixedHashes-old.nix
# start with empty fixedHashes
echo '{}' > fixedHashes.nix

nix-build ../../../../.. -Q --no-out-link -A texlive.scheme-full.pkgs | ./fixHashes.awk > ./fixedHashes-new.nix

mv fixedHashes-new.nix fixedHashes.nix

Commit changes

Commit the updated pkgs.nix and fixedHashes.nix to the repository.