pdflatex is broken without texmf-dist-lang

Package Information

• Package name: texlive | texmf-dist
• Package version: 20240210.69778-r2 | 2024.0-r4
• Alpine version: 3.20.0
• Alpine architecture: x86_64 (should not matter)

Summary

In Alpine 3.20.0, installing texlive does not give us a working pdflatex. Even the simplest document fails to compile. A simple workaround is to also install texmf-dist-lang (or the whole texmf-dist-full for that matter). This is a regression compared to Alpine 3.19.

Steps to reproduce

In a vanilla alpine container (docker pull alpine:3.20):

apk add texlive    # this runs `fmtutil-sys --all`, *apparently* without error
echo '\documentclass{article}\begin{document}TEST\end{document}' > test.tex
pdflatex test.tex  # fails: I can't find the format file `pdflatex.fmt'!

In fact, fmtutil-sys --all had failed to build 46 formats, including pdftex/latex (and exited with status 46)!

Analysis

The mktexfmt log /usr/share/texmf-var/web2c/pdftex/pdftex.log reveals the problem: "can't find file 'dehypht-x-2024-02-28.tex'". Format generation fails when loading the hyphenation patterns defined in /usr/share/texmf-dist/tex/generic/config/language.def. In Alpine 3.19, the necessary files (look for, e.g., dehypht-x*) were contained in the basic texmf-dist package (a dependency of texlive) and the above recipe worked. Now they are bundled in texmf-dist-lang: only if that is installed as well, pdflatex works.

Not sure how to fix this properly. Maybe one could update/sync the language definition files with the actually installed languages. It seems in manual TeX Live installations, tlmgr generate language --rebuild-sys would do this, but tlmgr does not seem to be available.