Why do you need the wrapper? texlive and texlab seem to be perfectly composable right now – they just need to be installed together in nix-env/configure.nix/nix-shell.

@veprbl The wrapper was added to ensure purity, so that the language server isn't dependent on the environment, and fully functionally without having to install additional packages. Why is this a problem?

@Metadark You say "purity", but what you describe is actually "isolation". Latter, to some degree, can be achieved in different many ways depending on what task you have. It's really up to user to decide what kind of isolation they want to have. The problem is, I think, that putting texlive.combined.scheme-small for default setting would not satisfy any of the users, and may lead to some surprises for those who are not expecting this wrapper.

@veprbl What I describe is isolation, but also purity. Relying on whatever is in PATH to resolve dependencies is relying on global mutable state, which is impure.

The wrapper also doesn't prevent users from deciding what kind of "isolation" they want to have, it makes the decision more explicit:

{ config, pkgs, ... }:

{
  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    (texlab.override { tex = tectonic; })
  ];
}

If you had multiple TeX distributions installed, then texlab would just select whatever one it finds first, which may not be the one you want. If anything, this should lead to fewer suprises.

The same kind of thing is done for TeX distributions on:

• asciidoc
• ipe
• pidgin-latex
• sphinxcontrib-tikz
• texmacs

Some projects do the patching in the patch / fixup phases, but I created a separate derivation so texlab doesn't need to be rebuilt to change the TeX distribution.

Closing in favour of #85700