Re: lmodern fonts and sarge
From: Florent Rougon <f.rougon@free.fr>
Subject: Re: lmodern fonts and sarge
Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2004 11:07:55 +0100
> Hilmar Preusse <hille42@web.de> wrote:
>
> > In November of last year we had a short thread "Licenses of tetex and
> > its parts" IIRC. There I said, that we shouldn't create another
> > package tetex-xxx-nowfree with LaTeX-packages, which will be included
> > in next teTeX-release. The reason was, that later we would have to
> > add another Conflicts-field to tetex etc. I anybody needs a special
> > package. This is what CTAN is good for.
>
> Hmm. You can always install software from source. IMHO, it is easier for
> the tetex maintainers to add a package to Conflicts: than for many more
> or less beginner LaTeX users to install the various types of files
> related to a font family the Debian way (which involves creating himself
> a file in /etc/texmf/updmap.d, running update-updmap, mktexlsr and
> updmap).
Please note that it could be not so easy as you might
think; for example bugs #207786 and/or #229725 had
very critical bad side-effects to tetex packages.
Also I guess difficulty of updmap might be not Debian
specific to some extent. It was drastically changed
its feature between 1.0 and 2.0
> It's not like every LaTeX user knows perfectly what sty, fd, tfm, pfa,
> pfb, afm, pfm, enc and the various types of map files are for (not to
> mention mf and pk for Metafont fonts), *and* would not be misled by a
> documentation about a slightly different TeX distribution (e.g., teTeX 1
> or even teTeX 2 without the Debian update-updmap stuff, and, well... all
> the non-teTeX TeX distributions). Did I mention the fact that they
> should also know they shouldn't modify files like
> /etc/texmf/dvips/psfonts.map even though these are under /etc?
It is easy to criticize *now* that the psfonts.map
is a generated file so should not be under /etc, but
in tetex 1.0 it was a normal file and when I packaged
tetex-2.0 for the first time experimentally, I never
recognized that it was generated file. It is true that
we gradually recognized its features step by step and
we, of course, recognized now the problem clearly.
But we should consider a side-effect too if we change
a basic behavior of postinst etc. in tetex packages because
it could cause problems to other related packages.
> Mmmm... let me recall...
>
> 4. Our Priorities are Our Users and Free Software
>
> Right. :-)
Please note there could be many points of view.
I don't know how to explain my feeling but I pointed
out my experiences;
In RedHat9, there is a Japanese TeX system with tetex
but it didn't work at all by default and I found a Japanese
RedHat user explained in his home page that "It is indeed
very difficult to set up Japanese TeX to work well with
RedHat. First edit a file like this way and then ...."
In FreeBSD 5.0, I failed even to install Japanese TeX package.
I believe tetex of Debian can say "Our Priorities are Our
Users and Free Software"
Regards, 2004-1-31(Sat)
--
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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