Bug#273244: tetex-bin: update-texmf is broken

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

severity 273244 wishlist
retitle 273244 misleading message with update-texmf -v
stop

Matt Swift <swift@alum.mit.edu> wrote:

> This shell transcript shows that update-texmf does not update /etc/texmf/texmf.cnf:
>
>     [beth] incoming# type update-texmf
>     update-texmf is hashed (/usr/sbin/update-texmf)
>     [beth] incoming# update-texmf -v
>     Regenerating /etc/texmf/texmf.cnf ... done
>     [beth] incoming# ls -l /etc/texmf/texmf.cnf
>     -rw-r--r--  1 root root 26194 2004-09-07 11:36 /etc/texmf/texmf.cnf
>     [beth] incoming# date
>     Fri Sep 24 15:50:06 EDT 2004
>
> Could it be that update-texmf thinks texmf.cnf is newer than all its
> dependencies?  No:

Why do you assume that update-texmf cares about timestamps? It's not a
makefile. It generates a new texmf.cnf into a temporary file, and then
uses ucf to check whether the old file (which may be edited manually),
the new version and the last registered version differ, and takes proper
action. If the files do not differ, the proper action is no action.

Which it does, as you showed. 

>     [beth] incoming# update-texmf -v
>     Regenerating /etc/texmf/texmf.cnf ... done

The only thing one could critize is the somewhat misleading
message. Retitling the bug, setting proper severity.

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