Bug#265590: tetex-base should suggest tetex-doc, not recommend
Hilmar Preusse <hille42@web.de> wrote:
> On 13.08.04 Jonas Smedegaard (dr@jones.dk) wrote:
>
>> tetex-doc seems from the description to be in the latter category
>> (as is the case with most -doc packages).
>>
> The texmf-tree is delivered from upstream as one tar ball. It
> includes everything excluding the sources of the texmf tree. So the
> doc is in reality a part of the texmf tree. We put it into an extra
> package cause (e.g.) an autobilder don't need texmf doc.
> There is at least one member of de.comp.text.tex, who got over and
> over questions from Debian users, just cause they didn't read the
> docs. Therefore we decided to make tetex-doc do be Recommend instead
> of Suggest.
To put it in other words: If you only want to process documents that
others deliver to you, like autobuilders do, you don't need
tetex-doc. For any other use of TeX, for anyone writing, changing or
updating documents, tetex-doc is a must.
TeX does not have a GUI and thus no "help" menu, but it has some nice
on-line help functions nowadays, delivered by tetex-bin. These will fail
to work if tetex-doc is not installed. Any program with a "help" button
will include it's help files in the package, or a depended-on,
architecture independent *-doc/-common package. We need not really
depend on it, but only suggests is clearly too low IMO.
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster, Biozentrum der Univ. Basel
Abt. Biophysikalische Chemie
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