Re: Upgrade procedure for tetex
Hello:
kai@khms.westfalen.de (Kai Henningsen) wrote:
> I think a text like this one would be quite ok:
>
> "I see that you have one or more of the pre-1.3 TeX packages installed.
>
> Because these packages had serious problems, they were replaced by teTeX.
> Unfortunately, because of those problems (and because of a missing feature
> in the packaging system), you have to deinstall those packages before you
> can proceed to install teTeX.
>
> This is how to do it:
>
> [...]
>
> Please press [RETURN]:"
The only thing I dislike here is the "This is how to do it" part. Old
TeX packages are buggy, and that makes them hard to uninstall (at
least cleanly) under certain conditions. That's likely to cause
problems to many people doing the upgrade, and will keep the now
generalized idea that Debian TeX is a bad thing.
In addition to the method suggested by Kai (checking for old packages
in preinstall and issuing a polite message to the user) I would
suggest something else. Why not creating a shell script that is able
to perform the upgrade in a clean manner. The script would look for
any old TeX packages, remove them in the appropriate dependency order
(and with the appropriate dpkg options) and install the new tetex
packages, again in the right order. That script, would be packaged
into a small Debian package, say tetex-upgrade. That way, the "This
is how to do it" portion of the message would read:
This is how to do it:
"Select and install the tetex-upgrade package from within dselect.
Exit dselect, run
tetex-upgrade
and follow the instructions.
Please press [RETURN]:"
Opinions?
M. S.
------------
Martin A. Soto J. Profesor
Departamento de Ingenieria de Sistemas y Computacion
Universidad de los Andes masoto@uniandes.edu.co
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