Replacing portage texlive with "live" texlive

[ExecutorElassus]

So, I've gotten into the habit of using the live texlive package directly from CTAN, installing the entire tree to a local subdirectory and running tlmgr from there to update. I do this because the portage packages are sometimes quite out of date, and I don't like waiting. So this has led me to two problems:

1) I'd prefer to get rid of my system texlive entirely, but some of the dependencies appear to be unavoidable. TeXStudio, which I use with my local texlive, nevertheless requires that latex be installed on the system. /etc/portage/package.provided doesn't seem to work to eliminate packages from the dependency tree (and since it's version-specific, it'll be ignored when a new version comes out). How can I force portage not to install any of the texlive tree to the system?

2) or, failing that: is there any way to install the "live" texlive tree, in its entirety, to the system? Portage seems to split texlive up into dozens of packages, and I'd rather not have to deal with that. Is there any overlay that just has a "texlive-9999" ebuild that would install the complete tree and update it whenever I remerge it?

Thanks for the help,

EE

[plasmonics]

As far as the first question, you could try deleting all of the system texlive and prevent it from future install by putting a minus sign in the USE flag in make.conf, e.g. "-texlive-core". Not sure if this will work. However, this will also mask Texstudio and prevent it from installing.

As far as a single large texlive package with everything in it, the only distros I am aware of that offer it are slackware and LFS. Fedora, which is my main distro, splits it up in over a hundred packages.

I use texlive in gentoo with no problem. But I also don't use the latest packages from CTAN.

[logrusx]

[ExecutorElassus]

My /etc/portage/package.provided includes the following entries:

[Hu]

If you can do it by hand, and it isn't wildly contrary to good security policy, then you can do it in an ebuild.

You say that Portage wants to install all these packages despite them being provided. Please show the output where it tries to do that, and use --tree so we can see the dependency tree via nesting.

[logrusx]

[ExecutorElassus]

logrusx: Actually what I have in mind is a bit more ambitious, which is probably why it hasn't been implemented. What I mean is one package, call it something like "dev-texlive/texlive-complete-9999," that installs the entire texlive tree onto the system directories. This would mean it would need to fulfill package.provided entries for all of the individual packages, and also block them. And that emerging that package if it's already installed would just run 'tlmgr --update' to update them all from CTAN. It would be its own rolling release, that in this case would be ahead of the portage tree.

Hu: as you see, I have texlive-latexextra listed in package.provided. This means I should be able to 'emerge -c' it to remove it, yes? When I do, I get this:

[plasmonics]

I am not sure where your dependence on texlive is coming from. equery depgraph texstudio shows no dependence on texlive. If you have "latex" as a global use flag, it will pull in sphinx. AFAIK, you can use texlive (or not) without any global tex-related use flags.

As far as the total package, you could download the source from tug and write your ebuild script to compile it.

[Hu]

I see that your sphinx is so old that Gentoo no longer offers it, but that should not affect this question.

What is the output of namei -l /etc/portage/profile/package.provided? You mentioned /etc/portage/package.provided earlier, but as I understand the documentation, that is not the right path. Is that the path you used, or was that a transcription error when composing the post? My namei command uses the path that I think you should be using.

[sam_]

For package.provided, you can give a fake version of 9999 for each package concerned.

[logrusx]

[ExecutorElassus]

[logrusx]