Re: [Frank Kuester] Please describe your tasksel policy, and re-add the tex task
Hilmar Preusse <hille42@web.de> wrote:
> On 27.09.04 Frank K?ster (frank@debian.org) wrote:
>
>> - We have to decide whether a meta-package or just carefully chosen
>> Recommends/Suggests are the best way to simplify the choices for
>> users.
>>
> What does mean the latter? In the moment tetex-bin is something like
> the central package. "apt-get install tetex-bin" should give you a
> working teTeX and suggest to install tetex-extra. The Meta package
> would have just to depend on tetex-bin and so its surplus.
- Installing tetex-bin and its mandatory dependencies should give a
working TeX system;
- Installing tetex-bin, its Depends and the Recommends should give a
fairly complete LaTeX, ConTeXt, TeX, etc. development system.
However, there are _lots_ of programs that are simply useful when you
want to write documents with *TeX, but are not closely related enough to
warrant an entry in tetex-bin's Recommends line. Maybe not even
Suggests, and even that won't give you the option to automatically
install all of them, as Recommends does (with aptitude, e.g.).
Packages I'm thinking of are
- add-on (La)TeX packages like latex-beamer, tetex-{brev,...},
pdfscreen, texpower, abntex
- Preprocessors like lilypond, fig2ps
- Postprocessors like pdftk, dvidvi
- Things for far-east (or african or whatever languages) like
dvipdfm-cjk | dvipdfmx, arabtex,
- Converters like latex2rtf
- Things that help in editing, like auctex, preview-latex, bibtool,
bibview, chktex
Looking at the list, I think it doesn't even make sense to create a
meta-package or a task for this, because nobody will want all of
them. But it would be great to have a list of related packages somewhere
in /usr/share/doc/tetex-bin/.
> Hmm, that task could be very large, if it installs every kind of XML
> processor. As Joey Hess already said in the bug report: users who
> want teTeX or something like text processors should know, what they
> are looking for. These tools are very specialized often and it
> doesn't make sense to install them as a single block.
While I agree with your conclusions, I doubt that Joey is right in that
"should know what they are looking for". Rather, I think we would do our
users a favor if we would help them through the big bunch of possible
packages.
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster, Biozentrum der Univ. Basel
Abt. Biophysikalische Chemie
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