Help with configuration order

[Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at>]

Hi all!

I have the following (small) problem occurring in very seldom
circumstances, but well, it happens. Imagine:

$ aptitude remove texlive-base
$ aptitude install texinfo texlive-base

$ aptitude install texlive-base

texlive-base (and -base-bin) is installed, together with all the
necessary libraries etc. Also the /etc/texmf/fmt.d/ file containing the
entries for mf, tex, pdftex is installed.

Works

$ aptitude remove texlive-base

remove all packages, also the libraries (were marked as automatic by
aptitude)

At this moment /etc/texmf/fmt.d/10texlive-base-bin.cnf is still
installed (config file and removed not purged), but the list file is
missing.

$ aptitude install texinfo texlive-base

Now the fun begins:
. all the packages are unpacked
  also the list file in /var/lib/tex-common/... is installed (it is
  *not* a config file, so it is immediately present!)
. due to aptitudes internals *first* texinfo is configured
  - texinfo.postinst calls update-fmtutil which does include the lines
    for mf etc into the fmtutil.cnf file (the list file for
    texlive-base-bin is already in place!)
  - texinfo.postinst calls fmtutil-sys --missing
    fmtutil-sys tries to create mf.base, but breaks because the libs (!)
    are not configured already (cannot load lib blabla)
. aptitude configure all the libraries, texlive-base-bin, texlive-base
. aptitude retries configuring texinfo, which finally succeeds.

So there is a problem, although the same run makes the packages being
installed at the end correctly.

I tried the same with tetex, but it doesn't work. It is always that
first tetex-bin is configured (and prior to this the libs), and then
texinfo, so no problem here.

(Side note: Something similar happens with fontconfig at remove stage,
when fc-cache is called but the library is already removed, so not only
I have problems with this type of dependencies ;-)

THere are several ideas for solving this problem:
. ignore, the basic lib (libx11 or jpeg) is normally installed. if one
  installs texinfo, then they will be there anyway
. make the list files in /var/lib/tex-common/fmtutil-cnf/ to config
  files, which would ensure that they are actually are installed late
  enough so that this doesn't happen.
. other option????

Thanks for any comments on this.

Best wishes

Norbert

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Dr. Norbert Preining <preining AT logic DOT at>             Università di Siena
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