Bug#223728: tetex-bin needn't depend on xlibs

["Michael K. Edwards" <medwards@sane.net>]

On Saturday 13 December 2003 04:24 pm, Atsuhito Kohda wrote:
[snip]
> I believe Michael's work is great, really great.  Only what
> I'm not so sure is, is it really good to split X-related
> stuffs into xdvi, texdoctk, and metafont-xterm-support ?
>
> There is one big non-X teTeX package and there are three
> (very small) X-related teTeX packages.

Thanks for the approval.  As for splitting into small / unbalanced packages, 
the split I proposed was motivated by dependencies rather than by size or 
function.  It started as a way to resolve a circular build-depends (tetex-bin 
still build-depends on xlibs-dev, but at least xlibs won't be pulled into a 
buildd chroot on account of tetex-bin).  texdoctk is separate because of the 
perl-tk dependency and the relationship to texdoctk-data split off from 
tetex-extra.  I suppose xdvi and metafont-xterm-support could be merged, but 
the description would be a little odd; besides, one might want the 
metafont-xterm-support but a different branch of xdvi.

> If this is a way to go then because we got #78926 which
> requested to split dvips out of tetex-* so we should do
> split tetex-bin into some more small packages.

That's defensible, but unless there are alternate, conflicting implementations 
of the split packages, it doesn't seem necessary.  dvips is not a large 
burden relative to a TeX installation complete with font cache, etc.

> At present I feel that it might be better to provide something
> like "tetex-bin-x" which include xdvi, texdoctk, and
> metafont-xterm-support but I'd like to hear from all of you
> how you think of this.

Apart from the above comments, I think Branden Robinson (with whom I conversed 
during the creation of this patch) raised a reasonable objection: "Don't call 
it tetex-x11 because it doesn't systematically add X11 interfaces to the 
TeTeX tools."

> Further if we adopt Michael's patch (or similar) in sarge
> then I believe I need help of all of you in many way.  Are
> you willing to do so?  I don't want to be a maintainer who
> break teTeX packages of Debian ;)

I'm happy to contribute where I can.  Thanks to all for taking the proposal 
seriously.

- Michael