texdoc won't work?

There used to be packages texlive-*-doc, but they have been removed from Arch Linux for some reason.

In this forum thread there is a PKGBUILD that you can use to build your own documentation package.

There used to be doc packages in the Archlinux repositories, but these are removed these days. I am not claiming that these are the official reasons, but here goes my concern:

To install all the docs, you would need to fetch about 850-900 MB material and then install more than 1.3 GB.

This is a lot of space for certain people, e.g. using old laptops like me for writing a book with LaTeX.

Furthermore, these docs can be accessible on the internet at ease. People usually have internet accessible these days, at least for the time of fetching it once, so this ought to not be such a big deal. Also, these docs are as frequently used as you may think.

I am a beginner and perhaps I use them now quite a bit, but I expect that when I get a bit more experienced, it would be used less and less for the same type of tasks. Therefore, going to the internet when I need is usually OK.

It is a pity if you want to get them all offline, for sure, but considering the workarounds below, it is not that difficult to get it working.

1) You may be able to request them from people's package cache who have not since updated their Archlinux yet.

2) Alternatively, you could also get it from a "mirror" that stores old versions.

3) You could perhaps even check the git history of the Archlinux repositories to check out the working PKGBUILDs for the time.

The working PKGBUILD and install files for a monolythic doc package from the Archlinux forum:

PKGBUILD

pkgname=texlive-most-doc
pkgver=$(date +%Y%m%d)
pkgrel=1
pkgdesc="Most TeXLive documentation"
url="http://tug.org/texlive/"
arch=('any')
license=('unknown')
optdepends=('texlive-bin: The texdoc program and some more documentation')
makedepends=('wget')
install='texlive-most-doc.install'
options=('!strip'  '!purge')

build() {
  wget -r -l inf -N -nH -nv --cut-dirs=3 -P "$srcdir/usr/share/" ftp://tug.org/texlive/Contents/live/texmf-dist/doc
  wget -r -l inf -N -nH -nv --cut-dirs=3 -P "$srcdir/usr/share/" ftp://tug.org/texlive/Contents/live/texmf/doc/asymptote
  wget -r -l inf -N -nH -nv --cut-dirs=3 -P "$srcdir/usr/share/" ftp://tug.org/texlive/Contents/live/texmf/doc/dvipng/dvipng.pdf
  wget -r -l inf -N -nH -nv --cut-dirs=3 -P "$srcdir/usr/share/" ftp://tug.org/texlive/Contents/live/texmf/doc/dvips/dvips.pdf
  wget -r -l inf -N -nH -nv --cut-dirs=3 -P "$srcdir/usr/share/" ftp://tug.org/texlive/Contents/live/texmf/doc/man
  wget -r -l inf -N -nH -nv --cut-dirs=3 -P "$srcdir/usr/share/" ftp://tug.org/texlive/Contents/live/texmf/doc/info
  wget -r -l inf -N -nH -nv --cut-dirs=3 -P "$srcdir/usr/share/" ftp://tug.org/texlive/Contents/live/texmf/doc/tetex
  wget -r -l inf -N -nH -nv --cut-dirs=3 -P "$srcdir/usr/share/" ftp://tug.org/texlive/Contents/live/texmf/doc/texlive
  wget -r -l inf -N -nH -nv --cut-dirs=3 -P "$srcdir/usr/share/" ftp://tug.org/texlive/Contents/live/texmf/doc/texworks
  wget -r -l inf -N -nH -nv --cut-dirs=3 -P "$srcdir/usr/share/" ftp://tug.org/texlive/Contents/live/texmf/doc/web2c/web2c.pdf
  wget -r -l inf -N -nH -nv --cut-dirs=3 -P "$srcdir/usr/share/" ftp://tug.org/texlive/Contents/live/texmf/doc/ttf2pk/ttf2tfm.txt
  wget -r -l inf -N -nH -nv --cut-dirs=3 -P "$srcdir/usr/share/" ftp://tug.org/texlive/Contents/live/texmf/doc/ttf2pk/ttf2pk.txt
}

package() {
  cp -rl "$srcdir"/* "$pkgdir"
}

texlive-most-doc.install

post_install() {
  texhash
}

post_remove() {
  texhash
}

post_upgrade() {
  texhash
}

If you could get it working and submit it to AUR, that might be great for some users in similar situations.

There seems to be an aur package called texlive-most-doc, that claims to contain "Most TeXLive documentation". Installing it seems to fix the problem for me.