Re: Testing for existance of a file.

[Mitch Blevins <mblevin@mindspring.com>]

In foo.debian-mentors, you wrote:
> I looked at a few other things -- would it be possible (well, advisable)
> to rename my fonts, then in postintst, do the test, then either rename
> or delete my duplicates.

Possible, yes.  Advisable, no.
dpkg would still think the fonts are the original names, and would not
find them unless you also renamed them back in the prerm.  This is a kludge
and also would require an explaination in the cruft package.

DISCLAIMER: I don't use svgatextmode, so I may be missing something.
Here is my understanding of your problem:

*) svgatextmode requires some fonts that are also provided in other
   packages.

Why can't you split it into two packages: svgatextmode and svgatextmode-fonts.
Assuming package foo contains the duplicate fonts, you can then have
svgatextmode Depend: on svgatextmode-fonts | foo

If the case is that foo only provides *some* of the necessary fonts,
then I guess you could have the non-problem fonts in the main package.
You could also always edit the TextConfig config file and change the
required fonts to make this easier on you.

-Mitch