Request for an "etch-ignore carte blanche" for alternative texlive dependencies

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Dear release team,

I would like to start a mass bug filing (not yet discussed on -devel,
severity non-RC) on packages that depend on teTeX without an alternative
TeXlive dependency.  This is mainly targetted at lenny, but I would also
like to encourage people to fix their bugs if they still plan uploads
for etch.

There's a little problem, though:  Due to the larger number of texlive
packages, it's not trivial to figure out the correct depends, and I
think it would be a RC bug to switch from, e.g., correct

Depends: tetex-bin, tetex-extra

to a buggy

Depends: tetex-bin | texlive-latex-base, tetex-extra | texlive-latex-recommended

if it turns out that texlive-latex-extra or texlive-fonts-recommended is
also needed.

Would it be possible to get a "carte blanche" for an etch-ignore tag for
any RC bug that

- has been introduced by adding alternative dependencies on texlive

- on a package that had correct dependencies before that

- if the texlive alternatives are listed second, so that the working
  combination will be installed if no TeX system was installed before

Of course, the best thing to do would be to fix these bugs in an
upload.  However, if the bug is only detected shortly before the package
is old enough to migrate, even that would hinder it very much, and
therefore this situation makes it unlikely that people fix these kinds
of bugs unless they're familiar with texlive themselves.

On the other hand, I think that the overall quality of the distribution
is better even with some bugs of that kind in it[1], if on the other hand
as many packages as possible can be used with both TeX systems (and
texlive, the new one, is the one that I'd advice for any user and will
use myself).

Thanks for considering,
Frank

[1] a type of bug that can be easily worked around, by documenting the
packages that need to be installed manually
-- 
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)