Bug#316245: tetex-bin: postinst failure while building etex and pdfetex formats
Laurent Bonnaud <bonnaud@lis.inpg.fr> wrote:
>> Well, that symlink is contained in the package tetex-base itself
>> (i.e. created during build time). Do you have any clue, why it
>> was not written to the disk?
>
> I removed it myself to get rid of the circular symlink.
>
> When I reinstall tetex-base on a system where both language.def symlinks
> are removed, the proper /usr/share/texmf/tex/plain/config/language.def
> symlink comes back, but I get this error:
>
> # apt-get install --reinstall tetex-base
> [...]
> Preparing to replace tetex-base 3.0-7 (using .../tetex-base_3.0-7_all.deb) ...
> Unpacking replacement tetex-base ...
> Replaced by files in installed package tex-common ...
> Setting up tetex-base (3.0-7) ...
> dpkg: tetex-base: warning - config file `/etc/texmf/plain/language.def' is a circular link
> (= `/etc/texmf/plain/language.def')
>
> and this symlink is created:
>
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 29 2005-09-09 14:12 /etc/texmf/plain/language.def -> /etc/texmf/plain/language.def
>
This bug is pretty confusing, but I think that it is either due to some
particular problem on your machine (hardware or improper user action),
or due to a problem when upgrading between particular versions in
experimental that I haven't tested. I only tested upgrades from sid,
and for the younger versions the upgrade from the previous version
(althought the latter sometimes required manual action).
> If I reinstall tetex-base on a system
> where /usr/share/texmf/tex/plain/config/language.def exists, I get:
you mean where it exists as a symlink? What about the target?
>> Can you (just for fun) purge you teTeX system on the broken machine
>> and do a complete reinstall 3.0? Does that solve the problem?
>
> It is not funny because it would remove 40 packages and 150MB from my
> system and reinstalling everything afterwards would be a pain.
Just for the record: For such purposes it would work to remove the
tetex packages with dpkg --force-depends and reinstall immediately
afterwards.
> Furthermore I would loose the ability to test a potential fix.
Frankly speaking, if there _is_ a bug in the experimental packages that
causes a circular symlink, we would fix it in the sense that it does no
longer do that; but I wouldn't spend much time on fixing existing
experimental systems. That's why the package is in experimental -
you've been warned.
But I really cannot see where we could be causing this
*in*our*current*package*. In your message
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=316245;msg=26
you wrote that
$ ls -l /etc/texmf/plain/
total 36
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 66 2004-03-22 19:52 aleph.ini
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 239 2004-03-26 20:13 bplain.ini
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 189 2004-03-26 20:13 etex.ini
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 19 2001-11-02 01:43 omega.ini
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 187 2004-03-26 20:11 pdfbplain.ini
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 189 2004-03-26 20:11 pdfetex.ini
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 186 2004-03-26 20:11 pdftex.ini
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 186 2005-02-06 01:20 pdfxtex.ini
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 66 2004-03-10 21:36 tex.ini
This means that at some time in the past there must have been a symlink
/usr/share/texmf/tex/plain/config -> /etc/texmf/plain
otherwise dpkg would not have installed those files there. This was the
case before March 7th in 2.99.9.20050111-beta-2 and earlier. Did you
have this package installed?
> BTW, keeping my system in a broken state is a pain. Should I wait for a
> potential fix or fix it myself ?
It seems as if it is a problem with upgrading between experimental
versions. Since we don't really support this, there's no need to wait
for testing.
Just remove /etc/texmf/plain and reinstall again.
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer
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