Re: Bug#872223: tex-common: fails to configure, fmtutils reports errors about missing files

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

Control: reassign -1 texlive-htmlxml
Control: severity -1 serious

Hi!

On Tue, 2017-08-15 at 11:09:47 +0200, ydirson@free.fr wrote:
> Well, probably not a missing Conflicts, as downgrading tex-common to
> the stretch version does not fix the problem.  Really a problem with
> missing files that should not be missing.
> 
> In fact, despite having the package installed, there is no such .ini files
> on my system.  packages.d.o shows that texlive-htmlxml from stretch should
> have them, but for some reason they do not appear on my system:

I've not tried to reproduce this, but from the details that you give
later on it seems obvious this is a problem with the package (and the
downgrade procedure).

The files within texlive-htmlxml appear to have been moved in later
version into several other package. Those other packages contain
proper Replaces fields. I'm assuming you have just downgraded the
packages in the "wrong" (or unexpected) order. So that you downgraded
texlive-htmlxml first, dpkg honored the Replaces fields and didn't
transfer ownership from the new packages to the downgraded one. Then
you downgraded the other packages now owning those files, but not on
the old versions, and those files just disappeared.

In this case there are some Depends/Breaks/Conflicts fields missing
somewhere at least to handle downgrades. But I've not checked if also
to handle upgrades?

> What's common to those packages are that they were downgraded from buster back to stretch (they had been mistakingly upgraded):
> 
> texlive-htmlxml:amd64 (2017.20170629-1, 2016.20170123-5)
> texlive-generic-recommended:amd64 (2017.20170629-1, 2016.20170123-5)

Thanks,
Guillem