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 system wide to /usr/local as root. To speed up the download process, upstream highly recommends the installation of LWP,[1] which is packaged in the gentoo repositories as dev-perl/libwww-perl.
root #tar -xzf install-tl-unx.tar.gz # deflate the installation tar ballThe texlive distribution can be installed via a graphical user interface (GUI), a terminal user interface (TUI) or a command-line interface (CLI).
The graphical installer requires dev-lang/tk. If dev-lang/tk is not installed, install-tl will fall back to the TUI-based installer, which will fail silently when starting the installation.
root #emerge --ask dev-lang/tkroot #perl install-tl -guiThe TUI-based installer does not depend on dev-lang/tk and can be run as follows:
root #perl install-tlThe CLI-based installer does not depend on dev-lang/tk either and can be run as follows:
root #perl install-tl --no-interactionLet the installer create symbolic links for the binaries in /usr/local/bin/.
Dependencies
The manual TeX Live installation provides many packages, which could be installed via Portage too. To prevent Portage to install app-text/texlive as dependency, one can add the package names in a .provided file:
app-text/texlive-9999
app-text/texlive-core-9999
dev-tex/latexdiff-9999
dev-texlive/texlive-basic-9999
dev-texlive/texlive-fontsextra-9999
dev-texlive/texlive-fontsrecommended-9999
dev-texlive/texlive-fontutils-9999
dev-texlive/texlive-formatsextra-9999
dev-texlive/texlive-latex-9999
dev-texlive/texlive-latexextra-9999
dev-texlive/texlive-latexrecommended-9999
dev-texlive/texlive-luatex-9999
dev-texlive/texlive-mathscience-9999
dev-texlive/texlive-plaingeneric-9999
dev-texlive/texlive-pstricks-9999
dev-texlive/texlive-xetex-9999
dev-tex/tex4ht-999999999999
virtual/latex-base-1.0
virtual/tex-base-9999
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.
Updates
root #tlmgr update --allTrouble 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.