Bug#200264: tetex's dependencies on texdoctk, dvipdfm, perl-tk

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Hi all!

Frank Küster <frank@debian.org> wrote:

> I am confused. Could somebody else please try the following:

No longer confused. The reason for the problems was that the combination
of "Conflicts/Replaces/Provides" can only be used when this single
package completely replaces an older one. In our case, however, the
files are now distributed among tetex-base and tetex-bin.

Replaces: implicitly includes Provides, or at least it has the result
that a package that conflicts with foo will also conflict with any
package that replaces foo.

Therefore:

tetex-base: Replaces: texdoctk, dvipdfm
tetex-bin:  Replaces: texdoctk, dvipdfm
            Provides: texdoctk, dvipdfm

and no conflicts. The old configuration files will stay in place, but
this is a separate issue.

Now comes the part why I send this mail Cc: to Julian (probably you're
subscribed to -tetex-maint, but also probably you don't read it so
frequently):

texdoctk had a Depends on perl-tk, tetex-extra had and tetex-bin now has
a Suggests: perl-tk. We can discuss whether Recommends fits better, but
in any case we won't make it a hard Depends. 

Therefore it would be good to provide a helpful error message that tells
the user to install perl-tk. Is it possible to write something like this
in perl?

Regards, Frank


-- 
Frank Küster, Biozentrum der Univ. Basel
Abt. Biophysikalische Chemie