LaTeX: Need help with packaging a book in GNU Guix

[Artyom V. Poptsov]

Hello Guixers,

I'm writing a book[1] in LaTeX and I want to make a reproducible build
of it and package the book for GNU Guix.  The book builds with a simple
hand-written Makefile for now.

There are lots of examples of LaTeX package definitions in Guix for
sure, but unfortunately I found no examples of packaged books written in
LaTeX.

I'm sure that there are avid LaTeX users in the community, seeing how
many LaTeX packages are getting into the upstream.  I'd appreciate if
someone give me a link to a working "package" definition for a LaTeX
book or any hint how to proceed further with my task.

For now I've written "guix.scm"[2] that allows me to build the book in
the pure Guix shell:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
guix shell --pure -D -f guix.scm
make -j$(nproc)
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

But unfortunately when I try

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
guix build -f guix.scm
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

Then I'm getting errors that "Liberation Serif" font is not found:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
(/gnu/store/h7iqqr3aajqhjkib2k2g0zipag2ya41s-texlivetexmf-20230313/share/texmf-
dist/tex/latex/fontspec/fontspec.cfg)))

! Package fontspec Error: The font "Liberation Serif" cannot be found.

For immediate help type H <return>.
 ...                                              
                                                  
l.8 \setmonofont
                {Liberation Mono}
?
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

Moreover I see that the build tries to update the font cache but fails
to do that because the part of the file system it tries to write to is
read-only:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
(/gnu/store/h7iqqr3aajqhjkib2k2g0zipag2ya41s-texlivetexmf-20230313/share/texmf-
dist/tex/latex/base/book.cls
Document Class: book 2022/07/02 v1.4n Standard LaTeX document class

(/gnu/store/h7iqqr3aajqhjkib2k2g0zipag2ya41s-texlivetexmf-20230313/share/texmf-
dist/tex/latex/base/bk10.cloFontconfig error: No writable cache directories
Fontconfig error: No writable cache directories
))
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

Please find the full build log attached.

ln21k7976vq3j1rnfg342vk4p4wwy4-sparc-book-git.drv.gz
Description: application/gzip

Thanks!

- avp

References:
1. https://github.com/artyom-poptsov/SPARC
2. https://github.com/artyom-poptsov/SPARC/blob/master/guix.scm

-- 
Artyom "avp" Poptsov <poptsov.artyom@gmail.com>
Home page: https://memory-heap.org/~avp/
CADR Hackerspace co-founder: https://cadrspace.ru/
GPG: D0C2 EAC1 3310 822D 98DE  B57C E9C5 A2D9 0898 A02F

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