texlive-dummy package

This is the README for texlive-dummy-fc44, version 2026-05-19.

WARNING! This is a serious hack and you should be clear about what you are doing.

Background

The texlive packages available for RHEL-8 (and derived distributions such as CentOS-8) are relatively old and seriously incomplete. For Fedora, they seem to be more up-to-date, but still cannot "compete" with TeX-Live's own distribution mechanism. Although it is possible to remove the native texlive packages and install a more recent complete TeXLive distribution, any attempt to install packages that depend on texlive resources (such as latex2html, lyx, etc.) will normally trigger the re-installation of the obsolete native packages. This is inefficient and the redundant packages can interfere with the TeXLive resources.

This package contains a "dummy" rpm which is intended to satisfy any dependencies on texlive resources, allowing packages like latex2html, lyx, etc. to be installed without using –nodeps and without triggering re-installation of texlive rpms. All native texlive packages will be removed when the texlive-dummy package is installed.

It is the responsibility of the user to ensure that any necessary resources normally provided by native packages have in fact been installed. A recent TeXLive distribution should suffice. If necessary, packages can be installed directly from CTAN into a local or personal texmf tree.

This version is based on a Fedora 36 installation and is building on the original CentOS-version by Bob Tennent (rdt at cs.queensu.ca). Since Bob does not have a CentOS machine available anymore, the old dummy packages are a bit outdated. However, this Fedora-based version should (sic!) work on other RHEL-derived distributions as well. But your mileage may vary…

The source rpm is included in case the user needs to add/remove lines to/from the spec file. Please send the maintainer a note about this so this package can be updated.

Inner workings and manual updates

A brief intro in how to do this:

Download the src rpm (texlive-dummy-2022-1.fc36.src.rpm) from CTAN.

Create a temporary directory and move the file there. Now extract the source package:

rpm2cpio texlive-dummy-2022-1.fc36.src.rpm | cpio -idmv

This gives the texlive-dummy.fc36.spec file we can edit to add extra dependecies. E. g., towards the end, add a little part to include what is needed for the package you try to install and that still triggers "dnf" or "yum" to pull in a whole lot of texlive stuff. Add the required "Provides:" after the last other "Provides:" and before the line with %prep

To find out what is needed, use e.g.

sudo dnf install –assumeno sagemath |
awk -e '/^ texlive/ {print "Provides: "$1}' >APPEND

This will try to install a package, sagemath in this case, but since it is assuming "no", nothing will be done in the end. Yet the required packages are listed. Extracting those starting with (indented by one space) "texlive" should give you a good list. ATTENTION! Some dependent packages do not begin with "texlive"; biber (included in this version) is one such example!

To get a complete list of all things provided by the typical Fedora packages for TeX, you can use

dnf repoquery --provides tex-cjw tex-preview texlive\* >texlive-provides.txt

Now rebuild the rpms:

rpmbuild -ba texlive-dummy.fc44.spec

This will rebuild both the src and installation rpm packages and tell you where they are to be found, usually under ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/texlive-dummy-2026-1.fc44.noarch.rpm and ~/rpmbuild/SRPMS/texlive-dummy-2026-1.fc44.src.rpm.

Install these by using

sudo dnf reinstall ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/texlive-dummy-2026-1.fc44.noarch.rpm

If this works for you, please send me your changes or the updated spec-file. Thanks!

Updates

UPDATE 19 May 2026: Added all provisions in Fedora 44 provided by tex-cjw, tex-preview and all texlive* packages, sorted and made unique. The list is now longer, should stop F44 reliably from installing anything related to texlive (and probably a lot too much, but if anyone find something that should not be in this dummy, please let me know). The sorting removed any comments from the list of Provides:, but that should be no real problem.

Hendrik G Seliger, October 2024 ctan at hseliger dot eu

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this software under the terms of the LaTeX Project Public License (LPPL), version 1.3c.