How to depend on local packages?

[Marc Plano-Lesay]

Importing local (in-repository) modules by providing paths to \usepackage is not supported, and breaks entirely if the package is relative. I tried to use latex_package, which basically acts as a filegroup, and as such keeps the file hierarchy. The work-around that I found was to use a local_repository, but given that it's a workspace rule, it's quite convoluted to use.

It would be great to have native support for local packages, maybe through the help of run_lualatex.py which seems to be doing something similar already to copy files around when it's needed.

[Patrick van Broeckhuijsen]

Your BUILD.bazel file can just use any package included in the tarball, even though they are not provided as a package by bazel-latex. For example:

load("@bazel_latex//:latex.bzl", "latex_document")

latex_document(
    name = "my_report",
    srcs = glob([
        "chapters/*.tex",
    ]) + [
        "@texlive_texmf__texmf-dist__tex__latex__<packageName>",
    ],
    main = "my_report.tex",
)

Including a local package that was downloaded separately - thus not included in the Oberdiek bundle for example - could be added the same way but this is of course less trivial than the example above. Hope this helps.