Re: #257075, #248351, #284469

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Richard Lewis <rtf@jabble.com> wrote:

> Frank Küster <frank@debian.org> writes:
>
>> Richard Lewis <rtf@jabble.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hilmar Preusse <hille42@web.de> writes:
>
>>>> I was proposing to close #225004 and related bugs and instead opening
>>>> another one containig all the work put into it.
>
>>> You could apply the same argument to the 'split tetex into smaller
>>> bits' family
>>
>> Well, there is a difference.  In the "TeX fonts for X" case, the
>> problem which the request was intended to fix is already fixed, while we
>> still want to split off a teTeX-xfonts package.  The various problems
>> that gave rise to the wish to split teTeX are not solved, are they?
>>
>
> replacing several merged bugs with one summarising the problem might
> be useful, and make the bts less cluttered.

That's a good point.  So maybe we should open a new bug (I think it's
possible to have one bug with two packages attached), to which all
discussions regarding splitting of tetex-base and tetex-bin are sent.
But I wouldn't close the other ones; maybe we decide that some further
splitting might be desirable, but that we won't do it for etch.

>> (and some never will - one bug reporter complained that when tracking
>> unstable he had to download a huge amount of data every time tetex-base
>> is uploaded.  This will not stop if the package is split, unless he
>> uninstalls most of it).
>
> presumably (maybe?) after the split the package(s) holding the texmf
> files will be fairly stable and wont need to be redownloaded after
> every small change

The problem is that it _will_ be redownloaded, because the version
numbers of all parts change if one subpackage is changed.

What will really be a relieve here is if we actually create a tex-common
package.  This has been discussed with the TeX-Live people who want to
create real Debian packages. The tex-common package would contain the
common infrastructure: parts of texmf.d/, and especially the update-*
scripts.  I hope this will safe quite some part of the downloading, at
least for tetex-bin.  Maybe we should consider to create a tetex-common
package which is built from the tex-common source (and thus does not
trigger downloads of -base, -extra, or -bin when updated) and contains
as much of the Debian-specific teTeX stuff as possible.  But that's a
different issue - I think I should open a bug on this, too.

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer