If we keep the tests as     --no-build-vignettes --no-manual     then we do not need texlive anyway.  The r-base-dev package brings a lot of useful and needed depends it; I think we'd be ill-advised to replicate it.   But I concede that it will also bring in some texlive.   Here, I was mostly trying to point out to you that we do not need _additional_ texlive packages as r-base-dev already brings what is usually enough, and more than we may need here.  Makes sense?