Re: Release Goal Proposal: texlive-transition
On Mon, Jul 02, 2007 at 08:50:47AM +0200, Frank Küster wrote:
> Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> wrote:
> >> - tetex-bin and tetex-extra do still exist, as metapackages, and we
> >> would like to have the freedom to change their dependencies as we
> >> learn about users' needs, without bothering whether some package is
> >> broken by this.
> > Which precisely implies that the functionality provided by
> > tetex-bin/tetex-extra from one release to the next is not reliable;
> Exactly, but that problem exists, anyway.
This particular problem only exists because you're providing tetex-bin and
tetex-extra packages that don't have the same semantics as previous
versions.
If you were dropping them altogether, that would be another matter. OR'ed
dependencies on tetex would still be ok, and dependencies on tetex alone
would be RC bugs that need to be fixed. But by providing metapackages that
break the previous semantics, that actually increases the scope of the
transition beyond what it needs to be, since now *all* tetex relationships
need to be excised to be safe, even if they're or'ed dependencies.
And frankly, the claim that tetex-bin and tetex-extra packages which
arbitrarily change which functionality they provide gives users "a smooth
upgrade experience" looks like total nonsense to me. If the metapackages
aren't going to depend on the necessary texlive-* packages to ensure the
same functionality as the etch versions of the packages, they cause more
pain than they salve.
> The organisation of TeX Live (upstream) is different to our old teTeX
> splitting, and it would be hardly possible to create a package with
> exactly tetex-extra's, or even -bin's functionality.
Sounds straightforward to me -- identify all the functionality that was
included in each of the tetex-* packages, identify which texlive packages
provide each bit of this functionality, and include all of these packages as
dependencies?
> Moreover, the splitting of tetex is quite buggy, anyway. Even when we had
> not switched to texlive, we would have tried to make this better and thus
> would have changed the functionality provided by tetex-bin.
And that would have been a bad idea too from the POV of stability for the
user, and I would have objected to it all the same.
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
vorlon@debian.org http://www.debian.org/
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