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Re: About the updmap and VARTEXMF changes



Frank Küster <frank@debian.org> wrote:

> This should be included in some form in README.Developers, section
> 3. Maybe also a note in NEWS.Debian is necessary. In this case, the main
> text should only describe the present situation, without lengthy
> historical explanations.

Right.

> Well, it wasn't updmap that was changed, rather the fact that now
> $VARTEXMF is defined.

Ah, sorry, I misread the relevant changelog.Debian entry. So:

    Earlier versions of the Debian teTeX packages generated the final
    map files such as psfonts.map under /etc/texmf/dvips/. In tetex-bin
    2.0.2-17, the VARTEXMF tree was introduced in /etc/texmf/texmf.cnf,
    resulting in updmap writing the generated map files under
    /var/lib/texmf/dvips/config/. This new location makes it pretty
    clear that the generated files should not be modified directly by
    the administrator.

>>   If you accepted the recommended modifications to texmf.cnf that
>>   introduced the VARTEXMF tree in front of TEXMFMAIN, 
>
> This has to be accepted (in fact I didn't check whether placing it after
> TEXMFMAIN works also). If there's no $VARTEXMF in $TEMXF, the package
> will break completely. We also have some code in postinst forcing it
> into texmf.cnf.

I see.

> I'd suggest:
>
>    If two files with the same name exist in /etc/texmf/dvips/ and in
>    /var/lib/texmf/dvips/config, the ones under /var/ will take
>    precedence, since TEXMFMAIN is searched after VARTEXMF. Unique files
>    in /etc/texmf/dvips/ will still be found because
>    /usr/share/texmf/dvips/config is a symbolic link to /etc/texmf/dvips

OK.

> The next paragraph just explains "shadowing" in detail, and could be
> left out if the preceding one is good enough, right?

Yes.

>>      Note: this does not cover all packages that could exhibit the
>>            problem: one could imagine a font package that calls updmap
>>            and friends only if they are available; such a package
>>            wouldn't have to depend on tetex-bin.
>
> But still such packages should somehow care for changes in tetex. If we
> put the new paragraph in NEWS.Debian, that should be enough.

Hmm, one can hope... Perhaps a debian-tetex-announce list would be a
good thing too for these kind of things...

> Oh, you're right. The code is in remove-oldmaps yet, but for the map
> files we generated, I had planned to remove them without asking.

Well, I really didn't look at tetex's maintainer scripts. I'm relying on
your knownledge of the packages for that. :)
But if someone still has some files like psfonts.map under his
/etc/texmf/dvips, even with recent tetex packages installed, it is not
necessarily because the tetex packages failed to remove them. It can be
because they recently configured a package that puts them in the wrong
place, such as lmodern << 0.93-3. (I'm not sure whether you were saying
that the removal by the tetex packages is not yet fully functional)

> Yes, I think ucf can help. Or fixing dpkg [...]

Oh $DEITY... :-)

>>       (The good thing is, sarge installations will be OK.)
>
> And upgrades from woody also.

Sure, there was no lmodern package back then...

-- 
Florent



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