TeX Live manual installation

Gentoo provides packages for TeX Live in the official tree, but they are  very difficult to update. The TeX Live packages in the tree are several months (sometimes a year) behind upstream, while users who install TeX Live manually with the tlmgr manager get updates every day.

This procedure is very similar to other package managers like pip in python or the package managers of GNU R (using cran), and Perl (using cpan).

This page collects user experience and hints about the manual installation

Manual installation
Get the latest installer from https://www.tug.org/texlive/ and follow the instructions to install to.

Dependencies
The manual TeX Live installation provides many packages, which could be installed via Portage too. To prevent Portage to install as dependency, one can add the package names in a .provided file:

9999 tells portage, that we provide already the latest version of the package via tlmgr.

package.provided was banned in EAPI 7 for ebuilds, but is still fine and sometimes important for the local system.

Trouble ahead
The manual installation of TeX Live bears the chance of other conflicts and bugs than a Portage installed TeX Live. Keep track of all commands regarding the administration of TeX. Using the package manager of the distribution and of a software suite on the same system is always a challenge.