Bug#196582: Upgrading severity.
From: Tore Anderson <tore@linpro.no>
Subject: Bug#196582: Upgrading severity.
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 15:50:50 +0200
> A user who has no intention of modifying texmf.cnf do not, and should
> not, have to answer *any* question regarding it. I am such a user. I
> do not want to answer any *managed by debconf* question at install
> time, as it is a totally irrelevant question for me. And I do, when I
> install ptex-bin, expect it to work out of the box, still with no
> questions asked. The ucf solution does all of this. The file is, by
> default, "managed by update-texmf", and will be updated upon need
> accordingly.
>
> However, if I was a power user, with my own hand-crafted texmf.cnf,
> I will expect the Debian packages to accept that. I also will expect
> them to notify me whenever the maintainer (scripts) think I should add/
> modify/remove something from that file.
>
> Your setup cannot cater both at the same time, and therefore you ask
> a question at install-time only the power user is interested in seeing
> and answering. The ucf solution, on the other hand, caters both,
If I understand you correctly, here is a misunderstanding.
A question at install-time is not for power user and,
in fact, it is even unnecessary. Without /etc/texmf/texmf.cnf,
update-texmf works basically (or rather, this is the default
behavior).
If a user answered "yes" to the question at install-time,
then, because /etc/texmf/texmf.d/05TeXMF.cnf etc. are (of course)
conffiles, so dpkg would behave as usual.
If one didn't modified them then new upstream files would be
installed without any question.
If one modified them, dpkg would give a notification and a choice,
further, one (whether one is expert or not) can freely modify them
in any way.
# Are we talking about different points?
The role of /etc/texmf/texmf.cnf was only to provide, as the last
option, for a user who needed it by some reason or another.
For normal Debian users, basically, it is not necessary at all.
So now I inclined to think that I might remove debconf
questions (or set their priorities as low) and only explain
that one can, as the last option, also manage texmf.cnf manually
through /etc/texmf/texmf.cnf in README.Debian or somewher
because the current debconf questions might give misunderstanding
or confusion to a user that the two answers are equal-weighted
(hmm, perhaps not a natural English) while, in fact, they are
not equal-weighted -- the ratio of "yes" : "no" would be, say,
99:1.
Well, I'm not sure that the following explanation is of any help
for you to understand the situation, but texmf.cnf consists of
configurable parts (roughly, provided by original teTeX source)
and non-configurable parts (roughly, supplied by other packages).
teTeX's contents of texmf.cnf can be modified to add local
directories to search path or to increase pool_size etc.
by a user but the modifications supplied by other packages, e.x.
ptex-bin, are completely diffrent in their nature, they are
the minimum necessary modifications or indispensable modifications
which are explained in README or INSTALLATION of the packages.
(precisely, a very expert user can modify them but let put it
aside at present.)
And the final texmf.cnf would be sum of these two kind of
subsets. So texmf.cnf is very different in its nature than
XF86Config etc.
So we should handle these two kind of components in a different
way corresponding to their nature and texmf.d/ method has done
it -- teTeX's contents are handled as conffiles and
modifications supplied by other packages are handled as
configuration files.
ucf seemed not to distinguish these difference and ask
practically non-necessary question in some cases, IMHO.
Thanks, 2003-7-29(Tue)
--
Debian Developer & Debian JP Developer - much more I18N of Debian
Atsuhito Kohda <kohda@debian.org>
Department of Math., Univ. of Tokushima
Reply to: