Re: tex-common and priority

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at> wrote:

> Hi Frank! Hi all!
>
> My texinfo QA page gives me
>
> Package is standard and has a Depends on tex-common (within tex-common |
> tetex-bin (<< 3.0)) which is optional on arm.
>
> So it seems that there is a priority conflict coming up soon: tex-common
> is only optional, while texinfo is standard.
>
> Would would be the suggestedsolution to this, or do I ingore this?

Hm, what is the reason that texinfo depends on "tetex-bin | tex-common"
- frankly I don't recall.  The maintainer scripts should work fine if
none is installed, and "We want that texi2dvi/texi2pdf actually work" is
not even satisfied with tex-common.

Moreover, I find it strange that texinfo "Suggests: tetex-extra" (the
weaker dependency), while it even "Recommends: tetex-doc" - what's the
reason for the Recommends, which texts are actually useful for texinfo
authors? 

So one solution would be to simply drop the dependency on
tetex-bin|tex-common, and maybe also on tetex-doc, while moving
tetex-extra to Recommends.

The other solution would be to lower texinfo's priority;  I don't see
why it needs to be standard, as a tool that's only used by developers,
and among them only by a fairly large minority, mainly of traditional or
base software (while all the funky desktop stuff and probably many more
things are documented with xml/sgml/html).

Or we could do both, lowering the priority and dropping the Depends.  Or
I missed something important...

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