Re: Specifying TeX dependencies
Frank Küster wrote:
> I think that there's a (probably unwritten) rule that dependencies
> should generally not include reverse dependencies, in other words, if
> you depend on tetex-bin you need (and should) not depend on tetex-base,
> too.
Ok, forget about my proposal in that case. Although, the lmodern
packages in Sarge depend on both tetex-bin and tetex-base. I thought
Florent had a good reason for this.
> This puts the burden of ensuring that the functionality continues to be
> available on the maintainers of the depended-on package, i.e. on the
> people who know best.
That makes sense for something like a library. But for a TeX
distribution 'functionality' is such a wide field, I am not sure how one
could ensure it.
> On the other hand, it makes it easier to
> rearrange functionality in the packages that are only indirectly
> depenended upon - we can e.g. take things out of tetex-base into
> tetex-extra without bothering about depends, as long as there is a
> tetex-bin package that pulls them all in (see
> http://pkg-tetex.alioth.debian.org/splitting.html).
Do you really think this makes it easier? Right now tetex-extra depends
on tetex-bin which in turn depends on tetex-base. If we move some
package from base to extra, it won't be installed if people depend on
tetex-bin, only. Does tetex-bin then have to depend on tetex-extra?
Or should tetex-bin just depend on the to be created packages
tetex-bin-core, tetex-bin-x11, and tetex-bin-extra which in turn bring
in both tetex-base and tetex-extra. So in order to reduce the stuff for
(build)dependencies people would have to change from tetex-bin to
tetex-bin-core, right?
cheerio
ralf
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