Bug#354507: libkpathsea3 should be removed

[Frank Küster <frank@kuesterei.ch>]

Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de> wrote:

> AFAIK, there are no known API changes in libkpathsea4 

Please read this sentence loud, pronounce every word of the acronym, and
try not to think of George Doubleju.  You know, there are known knows,
and unknown knowns, or how was it? ;-)

Unfortunately I can tell you that there is a known API change, I already
described it in an older mail to this list:

,----
| There might be problems because the names changed - e.g. in
| libkpathsea3, "--format=map" would find files in TEXMF/fontname, which
| are now in TEXMF/fonts/map/fontname, whereas in libkpathsea4 the format
| refers to all map files, which previously were found with
| "--format='dvips config'".
`----

In other words:

root@sarge:/# kpsewhich lm.map
root@sarge:/# kpsewhich --format='dvips config' lm.map
/usr/share/texmf/dvips/config/lm.map
root@sarge:/# kpsewhich --format=map lm.map
root@sarge:/# 

frank@teTeX-3.0:~$ kpsewhich lm.map
/usr/share/texmf/fonts/map/dvips/lm/lm.map
frank@teTeX-3.0:~$ kpsewhich --format='dvips config' lm.map
frank@teTeX-3.0:~$ kpsewhich --format=map lm.map
/usr/share/texmf/fonts/map/dvips/lm/lm.map
frank@teTeX-3.0:~$ 

This difference will also be reflected in the API.

> Now that teTeX 3.0 is in testing and these testing-specific issues are 
> no longer an issue, would you expect any problems with simply renaming 
> libkpathsea4-dev to libkpathsea-dev (and providing libkpathsea4-dev)?

I'd expect that the applications that would create problems likely also
fall under the category "unmaintained".  They may not get any new
upload, or few testing.  The consequence would be that we'd get no bug
reports, but the problems would keep to exist silently.

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