While I was trying out the expl3 package debugging options, I got errors in some of the packages that come installed with TeXLive. (It’s tabularray, specifically.)
Naturally, the first thing to try should be checking whether there’s still an error in the latest development version from the package’s Git repository. I know that the relevant .sty file does have some changes in the Git repo.
Is it possible to clone the Git repo and then somehow point my pdftex, xetex and luatex programs to the cloned repo, so they would ignore the old version that’s installed as a part of TeXLive?
What do people usually do when they want to hack on a LaTeX package or class?
This is on Archlinux.
Generally
you can place the .sty in your TEXMFHOME (that’s a location that has precedence over the distribution), on Linux this is usually ~/texmf (you can run kpsewhich -var-value TEXMFHOME to make sure), therein run mkdir -p tex/latex/<package-name> and place the files which should overwrite your TeXLive distribution in that folder.
But
in the case of tabularray you’ll have a much easier job, since it uses l3build (a very handy build tool for TeX-packages). Just use
xxxxxxxxxxgit clone https://github.com/lvjr/tabularray.gitcd tabularrayl3build check && l3build installThe l3build check will test whether the cloned version has any regressions against the package’s own test files. You could as well omit that step.
l3build install will run everything necessary to do the stuff from the “Generally” section (as long as the configuration is correct).
You can recognize packages that use l3build by the configuration file build.lua. l3build is part of TeXLive (if it isn’t for you don’t use the TeXLive from the repositories but upstream vanilla – which is more the Arch way anyways).
If you want to remove the package again simply run l3build uninstall.
