Re: texlive xelatex not working [ Was fontconfig : .so.2 not provided by 2.11.1?]

[Brook Milligan <brook%nmsu.edu@localhost>]

> On Jan 22, 2016, at 2:50 PM, Rhialto <rhialto%falu.nl@localhost> wrote:
> Would it be possible to generate packages on-the-fly in such a way that
> the normal build process will generate a package when needed? This might
> be useful for Perl (CPAN) packages too, and Ruby has its own packaging
> system too, so this could work out very productively (if it is possible
> at all).

I won’t comment on whether it is possible to do this, but I’m not convinced that is a good way to maintain a reproducible set of software and therefore would question whether that is even an appropriate goal.

What I will point out is that more packages might be made in more consistent fashion if we had more tools that lower the barrier for producing packages for the subset that have a lot of boilerplate.  I believe there is already something along those lines for perl.  I’m not sure about ruby.  Certainly TeX packages fall into this category and could benefit from such a tool.  From my own experience I know R packages do, which was the inspiration for me writing pkgtools/R2pkg (although I am not sure anyone else has yet made use of it; please step up).  There are likely other families of packages that could be viewed in the same way.

Some investment in such tools will be leveraged across the many packages they make possible, just as investment in all the make magic is leveraged across all of pkgsrc.  This seems like the best step forward for related groups of packages.

Cheers,
Brook