circular dependency when building LaTeX?

[Phelype Oleinik]

Hi Thiago,

On Wed, Jun 23, 2021 at 10:30 AM Thiago Jung Bauermann via tex-live
<tex-live at tug.org> wrote:
>
> When trying to build texlive-latex-base, it complains that “! LaTeX
> requires expl3”. I then add texlive-latex-l3kernel as a build dependency,
> but that just makes the Guix build system go crazy because (at least on
> Guix), texlive-latex-l3kernel uses LaTeX to run `source/latex/l3kernel/
> l3.ins`.

Usually |.ins| files should be run with plain TeX, so |tex| or |pdftex|.
In fact, LaTeX has its own |format.ins|, which would be a LaTeX->LaTeX
circular dependency, so you need plain for that.

Phelype