Lualatex doesn't work in development since update to texlive2024

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Hi there,

I will post here since I think this is possibly an texlive upstream change interfering with the working of nixpkgs. I’m working on a LaTeX document compiled with nix much in the style of e.g. Exploring Nix Flakes: Build LaTeX Documents Reproducibly

MWE as a github repo (which is identical to the above): GitHub - mmaeusezahl/nix-texlive2024-lualatex-issue

Then I run “nix build”

  • with texlive2023 it works fine
  • with texlive2024 it doesn’t work (unless I add -shell-escape to latexmk)

TexLive2024 is in nixpkgs since commit 7cd5f8cda00425cd4ed283642f9a297a17a8f6b6, hence I noticed after updating nixpkgs.

This seems to be related to font loading as the error comes from luaotfload:

luaotfload | load : FATAL ERROR
luaotfload | load :   × Failed to load "fontloader" module "basics-gen".
luaotfload | load :   × Error message:
luaotfload | load :     × "...2024-texmfdist/tex/luatex/luaotfload/luaotfload-init.lua:301: system : no writeable cache path, quiting".

I did some additional tests and luaotfload seems to be happy

luaotfload | diagnose : =============== file permissions ==============
luaotfload | diagnose : Checking permissions of .cache/texmf-var/luatex-cache/generic/.
luaotfload | diagnose : Owner: 1000, group 100, permissions rwxr-xr-x.
luaotfload | diagnose : Readable: ok.
luaotfload | diagnose : Writable: ok.
luaotfload | diagnose : Checking permissions of .cache/texmf-var/luatex-cache/generic/names.
luaotfload | diagnose : Owner: 1000, group 100, permissions rwxr-xr-x.
luaotfload | diagnose : Readable: ok.
luaotfload | diagnose : Writable: ok.
luaotfload | diagnose : Checking permissions of .cache/texmf-var/luatex-cache/generic/names/luaotfload-names.lua.gz.

If anyone else has this issue: A workaround is to add -shell-escape

But this feels incorrect, as it is not necessary outside the build environment (so the document compiles fine using my system latex installation).

I suspect that something in latex kernel changed, which now requires shell-escape to create a certain file (which would be a latex upstream “bug”). But I’m not expert enough with LaTeX to pinpoint the origin.

Thanks for any suggestions!

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Ah, I found the solution…, it had already been reported on GitHub ten months ago
LuaLaTeX luaotfload fails to find a font · Issue #180639 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub and even been documented in nixpkgs
nixpkgs/doc/languages-frameworks/texlive.section.md at 64edd99db0e71161886690ebcf23055725db3c38 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub

Not sure why that was beyond my attention earlier…

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