Re: Recent Woody upgrade, TeTeX, XFree86, and Mozilla
On Tue, 6 Mar 2001, Josip Rodin wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 05, 2001 at 09:47:50AM -0500, Dale Scheetz wrote:
> > > > 2. During the tetex upgrade I was surprised to see the following:
> > > >
> > > > texhash: Updating /usr/local/lib/texmf/ls-R...
> > > >
> > > > Debian packages are NOT supposed to muck around in /usr/local!!!!!
> > >
> > > I think this stuff is allowed, actually, like that emacs site-lisp whatever
> > > it is... if anything, several packages do it, it can't be harmful. (Can it?)
>
> It seems to me that the script assumes that the admin would have used
> texhash/mktexlsr to generate the ls-R file anyway, so it does it instead. If
Exactly! It seems to me that policy is very explicit. We are not supposed
to make any assumptions about how the sysadmin uses the contents of
/usr/local, and this is exactly what is happening here.
> that assumption is wrong, which seems likely, then I guess you can file a
> critical bug against the package (`makes unrelated software on the system
> break').
So, which of the various tet-tex packages do I bug report? Does lintian
check this sort of violation? (I could then figure it out from my .deb
cache) Does apt-get log its activity?
>
> I commented hastily and without thinking it through, sorry.
>
Been there, done that ;-)
> > > > Is there any reason that we can't include progeny's version of Mozilla in
> > > > Debian Woody until such time as our maintainer delivers his release.
> > > ~~~~~ sid/unstable
> > >
> > > FWIW I agree... so what if the package is not tiptop, it's good enough for
> > > unstable.
> >
> > Well, I don't know where you get the "not tiptop" from. The Progeny
> > release has a working psm and the release in Debian doesn't. Which one is
> > not "tiptop"?
>
> It's a 9 MB package that takes over 26 MB of disk space to install, surely
> that's not the best way to package it.
I have no idea. I can barely keep track of what I should do with my
packages without making snap judgements about others.
Let me put it this way. Currently the unstable release of Mozilla is 0 MB,
the available replacement for this package is 26 MB and produces actual
functionality that the 0 MB package doesn't. Which would you rather have.
Or yet another way: The stable version is 9 MB but can't communicate with
my bank, but the 26 MB version can. Is 15 MB such a large price to pay?
Either way of looking at it says there are bugs in both packages, but the
fixes are better than the penalties for my money.
What we need is a process for integrating such third party software into
the release.
Waiting is,
Dwarf
--
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