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Re: Too many conflicts? (tetex vs. texlive)



Florent Rougon <f.rougon@free.fr> wrote:

> Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at> wrote:
>
>> This sounds quite reasonable. Only depending on tex-common, and calling
>> mktexlsr and updmap-sys only if tehy are present.
>
> I'm *almost* convinced. :-)   But...
> I'd like to hear Frank's opinion about that.

Uhm, I'm overwhelmed by the amount of mails in the list this morning.
Fortunately I do have time to read them, just run to the telefone every
30 minutes to check wether this guy is finally available...

But I might not have understood everything, and might miss some
important considerations.


Generally, I think that we should try to taylor the packages in a way
that 

- only stuff that needs the "real" programs from tetex-bin (or its
  texlive counterpart), like (pdf)tex, xdvi, dvips, need to depend on
  them

- while others can get along with tex-common.  

I think that this is already true for font packages, but I have never
tested it or even thought about it, except this morning.

> Before tetex-bin is configured, texmf.cnf might be broken or incomplete.
> updmap-sys creates files in $VARTEXMF/fonts/map/pdftex/ for instance,
> and that might change when a package such as tetex-bin is configured. 

Since the basic components of texmf.d are in tex-common I don't see this
problem.  Even if it happens that tetex-bin needs a change, this change
should be coordinated with Norbert and made in tex-common (and in the
Policy). 

> But there _are_ corner cases, and I cannot assume without a word from
> the teTeX maintainers that running these scripts before tetex-bin is
> configured is supposed to work in all cases.

In an other mail, Norbert suggested to move the scripts that are common
to tex-live upstream and teTeX upstream, like updmap and mktexlsr, to
tex-common.  The benefits would be obvious - most notably we would only
need one set of patches to them.  On the other hand, there are also a
couple of disadvantages:

- When the scripts change incompatibly (e.g. like the "recent" change to
  updmap not to silently skip nonexistent map files), uploads of teTeX
  and tex-live must be coordinated.

- Upstream code gets into a Debian-native package.


If we do move the scripts to tex-common, we should at least put an
unchanged upstream version (either teTeX or texlive) into it, together
with Debian-specific patches.  

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer



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