Subject: Re: bug#48064: texlive-* packages fail to build non-deterministically

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 05 Jul 2021 11:20:20 +0200

Thiago Jung Bauermann <[email-masked]> skribis:

> LuaTeX has a bug where sometimes it corrupts the heap and aborts. This
> causes the build of texlive packages to fail at random. The problem is
> being tracked at https://issues.guix.gnu.org/48064.
>
> While a fix isn't found, switch the default TeX format (and consequently
> also the engine) to pdftex to avoid the issue.
>
> * guix/build-system/texlive.scm (texlive-build): Change default value of
> the ‘tex-format’ key parameter to “pdftex”.

Pushed as 04f9f9158da348e8299e9ab90ec389ba81be46b0 with the text above
inlined as a FIXME comment.

On IRC there were concerns about Unicode support, which LuaTeX provides
but pdftex doesn’t (IIUC), but it would seem that the worst that can
happen is that documentation of the packages themselves would be
mangled, which is okay.

Anyway, it’d be ideal to get feedback from the LuaTeX folks!

Thanks,
Ludo’.