On Fri, 08 May 2009 11:59:27 +0200 Frank Küster <frank@debian.org> wrote: > Frank Lin PIAT <fpiat@klabs.be> wrote: > > > The development documentation for libraries and programming languages > > should not be installed by the runtime. > > > > This probably means that packages like perl, python, texlive... should > > provide a $foo, $foo-doc and $foo-runtime (or -bin, or lib$foo, or > > whatever). Other package that needs to depend on that tool should then > > depend on $foo-runtime. > > How could we separate texlive-$foo and texlive-$foo-runtime? > > And would it make any sense? While many people install python just > because an application they want needs the interpreter, users don't > usually install a TeX system because something needs it - but because > they want to right texts. Not true, I have various texlive packages installed on systems where I've never needed to write anything in TeX. I do use latex-beamer on some systems but one other systems where latex-beamer is not used, texlive is primarily brought in by docbook-utils, even if I don't need the TeX parts of docbook-utils. Converting docbook to HTML doesn't need TeX - only the conversion to PDF-type. We have docbook-xsl and others for those situations where packages use docbook conversions to HTML at build-time but docbook-utils is still useful. Even then, there is no need for someone using docbook2pdf to understand or even refer to the TeX documentation. Any TeX errors when converting from docbook to PDF via TeX are a bug in the tool doing the conversion to TeX, the user cannot be expected to care as long as their docbook syntax is correct. TeX is not the "source" for that conversion, it is a step-along-the-way and, as such, does not deserve to have the TeX docs installed. TeX docs should only be installed on systems where users need to write TeX - any dependencies that bring in TeX docs merely to support converting some other format into TeX as a step to TeX converting that on to yet another format, IMHO *must not* mandate that the TeX docs are also installed. texlive needs to make this possible for packages like docbook-utils. That, to me, means splitting the texlive runtime out from the docs. I rarely write TeX but I write a lot of docbook and expect to be able to convert that to PDF when necessary - without needing to care about how that happens or how to write TeX myself. Please support docbook-utils having a dependency *just* on the TeX runtime and not requiring the TeX docs. The bug in that dependency chain is in texlive-base which has "Depends: texlive-doc-base" - in the context of 'apt-get install docbook-utils', that is entirely unwarranted. > Only in the special case of software documentation does it happen that > the documentation is completely written, and the "user" (developer or > buildd) just needs the "runtime". Umm, we have a lot of people writing and building software documentation in things like docbook .... -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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