Re: Recent Woody upgrade, TeTeX, XFree86, and Mozilla
On Tue, Mar 06, 2001 at 06:52:27AM -0500, Dale Scheetz wrote:
> It seems that texhash is actually the culprit, as tetex-base.postinst only
> creates directories in /usr/local and then calls texhash. tetex-extra only
> calles texhash, and does so in both postinst and postrm scripts.
texhash = mktexlsr.
There is a problem here, though.
Software is meant to respect local settings etc. in /usr/local. teTeX
is set up to do so. Part of the behaviour of the kpathsea library is
to search for files. Obviously, it searches /usr/local before /usr.
But then, every time a file is requested, it must search through the
whole of /usr/local/share/texmf/<particular part of tree of interest>.
That's unacceptably inefficient. The way the kpathsea library gets
around this is to create a hash file (ls-R), and it *never* searches
the disk, it only checks the hash file.
So there are a few possibilities for dealing with this issue:
(1) Accept that anyone putting something in /usr/local/share/texmf
will actually want to use it, and that the
/usr/local/share/texmf/ls-R file is necessary for that, and so
mktexlsr should create this file when it runs. Furthermore, *not*
creating that file when running that command would be
counter-intuitive, confusing to sysadmins and probably cause
breakages and unexpected results.
(2) Commenting out all TEXMFLOCAL stuff in the default texmf.cnf.
However, this means that the sysadmin has to explicitly enable
TeX et al to see /usr/local, which is not the Debian way.
Finally, I don't see anywhere where we forbid this sort of behaviour
with /usr/local.
Julian
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Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, Queen Mary, Univ. of London
Debian GNU/Linux Developer, see http://people.debian.org/~jdg
Donate free food to the world's hungry: see http://www.thehungersite.com/
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