On 31/08/2014 15:56, Michiel Helvensteijn wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> It's been a while since I had to reinstall my machine. But I just
> have, and I'm finding myself without the latex3 '.sty' files where
> latex can find them.
> 
> I was a bit surprised they weren't included in the Arch package
> `texlive-core`, which include l3kernel. This explains a bug report I
> received several months ago regarding `pkgloader`, which loads
> `l3prop`. (Are all my expl3 packages now broken?)
> 
> Oh well, I checked out the svn trunk. The old build system seems to
> have been replaced by `build.lua`. It seems easy enough to use, but I
> can't manage to generate the required .sty files. In trying to bypass
> the build system, I just run: `cd l3kernel; tex l3.ins`. It seems all
> of the expected .sty files are now being concatenated into a file
> `expl3-code.tex` rather than generated outright. This is also true for
> the version on CTAN.
> 
> It seems I've missed a lot. Could someone bring me up to date? :-/
> 
> Thanks!

We've not supported loading individual modules from the 'kernel' bundle
for some years. Thus trying to do

    \RequirePackage{l3prop}

without

    \RequirePackage{expl3}

first has raised an error for quite a while now (I think from around the
time we rearranged from "l3in2e"/"xpackages" to
"l3kernel"/"l3packages"/"l3experimental": if you really want to know
I'll check back over the SVN).

As part of making expl3 loadable on top of formats other than LaTeX2e
(at least, on top of plain/ConTeXt: others not tested), it was much more
straight forward to roll all of the l3kernel code up into a single
extracted files. That makes no difference to how things are loaded it
should be more-or-less no issue: you used to need
"\RequirePackage{expl3}" and you still do. This also has the advantage
of reducing the 'log noise' from loading expl3 and the risk of
mis-matching files for the kernel part of the bundle.

Note that this change was included in the usual announcements I make
before uploading code to CTAN.
--
Joseph Wright