Specifying TeX dependencies (was: Adding a latex class to a debian package)

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at> wrote:

> Definitely not a bad idea. But OTOH, it is useless, as you cannot mix
> tetex-bin iwht texlive-latex-base nor texlive-base-bin with tetex-base,
> so the first one would be the shortest possible which makes sense.

I think that there's a (probably unwritten) rule that dependencies
should generally not include reverse dependencies, in other words, if
you depend on tetex-bin you need (and should) not depend on tetex-base,
too.  

This puts the burden of ensuring that the functionality continues to be
available on the maintainers of the depended-on package, i.e. on the
people who know best.  On the other hand, it makes it easier to
rearrange functionality in the packages that are only indirectly
depenended upon - we can e.g. take things out of tetex-base into
tetex-extra without bothering about depends, as long as there is a
tetex-bin package that pulls them all in (see
http://pkg-tetex.alioth.debian.org/splitting.html). 

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)