Re: Upgrade procedure for tetex
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On Sat, 1 Mar 1997, Chris Fearnley wrote:
> >On Fri, 28 Feb 1997, Christoph Martin wrote:
> >
> >> This is the upgrade procedure for tetex.
>
> I think tetex should be removed from bo and the old tex reinstated.
> The new packaging scheme is incompatible with a smooth upgrade process
> and I haven't seen (nor been able to conceive) of any way to fix tetex
> before the code freeze. Any thoughts I have that /might/ work
> (renaming all the tetex packages to names compatible with the old tex
> in such a way that upgrading is possible) are extensive enough in
> nature that risking keeping tetex in the distribution seems very unwise
> to me.
>
> I'm CC'ing Brian White and I'll submit a bug against ftp.debian.org in
> a few days requesting the files be moved as indicated. Unless, of
> course, someone comes up with a procedure that will allow tetex to
> install on old buzz/rex systems using dselect and without incident.
>
> > Since many users complained about the TeX packages of Debian, maybe
> >it would be good to drop these packages before the freeze, so that the
> >users don't get even more confused by 2 TeX distributions in Debian 1.3...
>
> Absolutely.
>
> PS. I remember that we had a discussion about rolling our own TeX. I
> was surprised to see tetex released at all. Did I miss an anouncement
> from the tetex team where they explained why they weren't going to
> roll our own TeX (as had been agreed on debian-devel)?
You probably missed my announcement a few days ago.
In short: There were several good arguments for both sides (own TeX or
tetex), but we had to make a discussion some time.
First I wanted to work on the old packages but then Chow Chi-Ming and
Christoph Martin both had start to debianize teTeX so I had a look at
their packages. There were some minor problems with the directory
structure but these were easily fixed with the help of Thomas Esser
(author of tetex).
It seams to be now that tetex is becoming a defacto standard for a UNIX
TeX distribution (for example it's web2c code is much more up-to-date then
the web2c upstream source according to Karl Berry, upstream maintainer of
web2c).
I thought a lot about Debian getting dependend on other developers but
after all setting up a TeX distribution is probably not the job of Debian
developers. And if we distribute tetex, the user has the advantage that
tetex is also available for lots of other UNIX systems, so he will be able
to convert tex files between these systems without much troubles.
I posted this here some days ago (if you missed it contact me again and
I'll send you a copy of the mail) and I thought most people agree with it.
The only problem that remains is the "Replaces" problem, which is in fact
not a problem of the tetex* packages but of dpkg. I already contacted Klee
about it (the new dpkg maintainer). He says he will take a look but the
change will probably be too late for 1.3.
So I suggest that we add a check to the preinst script (just as netscape
does it) and tell the user about how to upgrade the packages.
We should not delay tetex until 2.0 since the old packages are
really "buggy". IMHO most users will prefer the slightly more complicated
upgrading procedure over the old packages.
But we should not forget to test the new packages now! So please, everyone
using tex should switch over to the new packages and report any bugs that
appear. (BTW, Christoph Martin told me that he is on holidays for about a
week. He will fix any bugs after that.)
There are still a few packages that need to be adopted to work with the
new tetex packages. I'll post a list here if I had a look (perhaps I could
need some volunteers).
Thanks,
Chris
- -- Christian Schwarz
schwarz@monet.m.isar.de, schwarz@debian.org,
Debian is looking schwarz@mathematik.tu-muenchen.de, bm955877@muenchen.org
for a logo! Have a
look at our drafts PGP-fp: 8F 61 EB 6D CF 23 CA D7 34 05 14 5C C8 DC 22 BA
at http://fatman.mathematik.tu-muenchen.de/~schwarz/debian-logo/
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