texlive.combine: package 'combine' from CTAN not usable

[xworld21]

The attribute texlive.combine masks the package combine from TeX Live, which is thus not accessible for normal use. In the future, TeX Live could at any time ship bin, combined, tlpdb, which would also be masked by the current texlive implementation.

If anybody can think of a clever, non-breaking fix for 23.05...

For 23.11, I am working on a new interface (like texlive.withPackages, or texlive.scheme-*.withPackages, or something else of the sort) and since it would be a breaking change, we will be free to resolve the issue properly by e.g. moving the packages under texlive.packages.

Steps To Reproduce

According to the docs, to get the combine package, one should use

texlive.combine {
  inherit (texlive) scheme-infraonly combine;
}

which does not work as intended, because texlive.combine is not a TeX Live package but a special Nixpkgs builder.

Edit: let me add that the package combine can still be used by adding collection-latexextra, since the dependencies are created while building the tl attrset, well away from the final texlive attrset. Brave users can even fish combine out of collection-latexextra.

Notify maintainers

@veprbl
Cc @apfelkuchen6

[apfelkuchen6]

Some work for this has been done in #120578.

[xworld21]

This now works using with texliveSmall.withPackages.