Improvements to path resolution in tlmgr and other scripts using kpathsea

[Norbert Preining]

Hi Daniel,

I just commented on the PR.

> 1) Homebrew tries to avoid carrying patches ourselves as much as possible.  We do not have dedicated maintainers for specific packages so it's not efficient or easy for us to maintain patches.  For that reason we try to find solutions that require minimal patching, or try to upstream patches when possible.

Ok, we can look into this.

> 2) Every package exists in its own subdirectory in HOMEBREW_PREFIX/Cellar/PACKAGE_NAME/VERSION, so the root directory for TeXLive would be HOMEBREW_PREFIX/Cellar/texlive/58837.  Ideally we'd be able to treat HOMEBREW_PREFIX/Cellar/texlive/58837 like /usr/ is on Debian, though that does not work at the moment for the reasons mentioned in my previous email.

Ah yeah, forgot about this. So you cannot hardcode the path indeed. then
your proposed way to patch tlmgr would be fine, but I am not sure about
how we could integrate this into the main code base without breaking.
There would be the need for some automatic detection in tlmgr.

> 3) We don't typically split packages up the way Debian and other distros do for some large packages like TeXLive or Qt.  This is done for ease of maintenance, in exchange for packages like TeXLive being larger.

Makes it much easier to develop a Formula, definitely. 
With only one TL package in Debian it would be rather simply to get
everything going, and in particular no problem with config files.

> It is most certainly possible to test our formula on Linux by using

Well, I have linuxbrew installed (since I contribute on Formula for
CafeOBJ), and will try if it works build the current TL formula using
linuxbrew.

Best

Norbert

--
PREINING Norbert                              https://www.preining.info
Fujitsu Research  +  IFMGA Guide  +  TU Wien  +  TeX Live  + Debian Dev
GPG: 0x860CDC13   fp: F7D8 A928 26E3 16A1 9FA0 ACF0 6CAC A448 860C DC13