Bug#100332: tetex splitting (was: Bug#334611: tetex-bin: Please compile xdvi with lesstif2)

[Frank Küster <frank@kuesterei.ch>]

(switching bugs, because we want to concentrate the ongoing discussion
about the splitting scheme in one bug per source package)

Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de> wrote:

> Oh, and for Debian stable users it will take until 2008 or 2009 until 
> they can get a smaller tetex-base package - for the release of etch 
> (scheduled for the end of 2006), tetex-base needs to depend on all 
> pacakges that were split away.

I don't think this needs to be true.  First of all, we don't intend to
split tetex-base into smaller packages.  Instead, we want to move file
to tetex-extra: rarely used fonts and stuff that didn't work without
tetex-extra, anyway.  If one looks closely, it is not possible to use
all programs and formats that are supposed to be available with
tetex-base+tetex-bin, because it turns out that they depend on some
file(s) in tetex-extra.  I don't remember any example offhand, but there
are some.  On the other hand, some things from tetex-extra must be moved
to -base because they are a required part of LaTeX, and we talk about
moving the complete tex/latex tree to -base, minus the font support for
tetex-extra fonts and perhaps minus some big packages that are rarely
used for build-deps. 

Therefore if we move files from and to tetex-base as we have
discussed the last days, I expect that for most users who have only
tetex-base installed things will run more smoothly than before, simply
because some bugs vanish.  Those who have tetex-extra installed won't
notice a change, anyway.  If this is true, we could simply keep the
names as they are.

The only group that really is badly affected could be ConTeXt users;
does ConTeXt work currently without tetex-extra?

>> Other people have requested that, and I cannot judge who has more
>> experience with buildds.  On the other hand, I can very well understand
>
> It would be good if Debian had a policy which of the many conflicting 
> goals were a priority...

This is true, but I won't wait until we have that...

> How will an average user install teTeX?
>
> Mst likely through a metapackage depending on everything like
>   apt-get install tetex
>
> And this should install at least the complete teTeX.

ACK.  See also #276173

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