Bug#173872: tetex-bin: spurious dependency on perl-tk
From: Josip Rodin <joy@gkvk.hr>
Subject: Re: Bug#173872: tetex-bin: spurious dependency on perl-tk
Date: Wed, 25 Dec 2002 13:23:18 +0100
> > No, it is not old story. It is a main spirit or good design
> > or excellent feature of teTeX to provide integrated and consistent
> > TeX system. This is definitely true even today.
>
> And that's completely orthogonal to the concept of splitting out different
> parts into different packages.
I suspect you didn't know the structure of teTeX.
It consists of TeX itself and many related components
found in CTAN site.
It gathers them in a consistent system with good design
so to split it to small components means to go back to
the start point again. In a sense, it could be vain
effort or we would lose a reason to use teTeX source.
It is not simply collected but woven in other words ;)
> > TeX system consists of binaries and their supporting stuffs,
> > like configuration files and/or various kind of fonts (TFM,
> > PK, Type1, VF etc.) and all of them should be consistent.
>
> So use meta packages, versions in dependencies, carefully organize virtual
> packages etc.
The difficult point is not lack of ability of dpkg but
lack of good/reasonable design to split.
At least, I have no real idea how to split teTeX yet.
> But like I just said, that's not related to how these things need to be
> packaged. The very word you use, "component", describes this nicely: the
> system may not be complete without any one of these, but they are _not_
> indivisible from the whole!
Yes it could be divisible theoretically but to split it
in a way enough stable, reasonable and satisfactory in
practice could be difficult.
In fact, if many users really want to get smaller components
of so-called TeX system independently, it might be better to
package each components in CTAN site separately instead of
splitting teTeX, I guess.
But I suspect this would be another hard task to do.
> > That is, this issue heavily depends on users and it needs
> > very grave/common/reasonable reason (instead of unnecessary
> > nor small disk space) to split tetex into a few componets.
>
> It is disturbing to see a packager not concerened at all with irrational use
> of disk space. It is downright saddening to see so little sympathy for those
> users that don't have endless amounts of disk space that they are discarded
> as uncommon and unreasonable.
Hmm, you might misunderstand me or my English might be wrong
but I wanted to say that the (possible or necessary) way to
split tetex depends on users, so there might be many various
demands on how to split tetex, so we need to get common and
reasonable design (or, in short, consensus?) to split tetex
really. This didn't mean little sympathy for users with little
disk space. I think only it is dificult work.
Thanks, 2002.12.26(Thu)
--
Debian Developer & Debian JP Developer - much more I18N of Debian
Atsuhito Kohda <kohda@debian.org>
Department of Math., Univ. of Tokushima
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