Circular dependencies in texlive?

[John Reiser]

> I tried to build texlive-2013-0.1.20130608_r30832.fc19.src.rpm for EPEL, the build failed with the following error:
> 
> error: Failed build dependencies:
>         harfbuzz-devel is needed by texlive-3:2013-0.1.20130608_r30832.el6.x86_64
>         graphite2-devel is needed by texlive-3:2013-0.1.20130608_r30832.el6.x86_64

Notice that you are mixing .fc19 and .el6.  This allows another place for things to go wrong.

> So, building texlive-2013 requires graphite2-devel, and building graphite2-devel requires texlive2013.

Yes, but each dependency can be satisfied by installing a binary .rpm which is available.
Building texlive-2013 from source cannot proceed unless the binary of graphite2-devel
has been installed before the build starts.  So "yum install graphite2-devel".  Today this
is not a circular dependency, although it may be impossible to rebuild the world
from source only, without using some previous [or current] binary version of graphite2-devel.
Once upon a time the dependencies were not as strict, or there was a bootstrapping
stage that is not recorded in the .spec, or there was manual "cheating", etc.

> Does somebody succeed to open texlive.spec?
> When trying to browse this file, kwrite suddenly stops.

I have no trouble.  Check your download, disk space, etc.  Here are my md5sum:
53c5ebfad7693a476417aa407d3688c8  texlive-2013-0.1.20130608_r30832.fc19.src.rpm
d7fe656e5ec3727cc26dbcc216e3553f  rpmbuild/SPECS/texlive.spec

texlinve.spec has 329,568 lines, 14,562,823 bytes.
The texlive-2013 .fc19.src.rpm has 1,672,612,100 bytes.