Today I upgraded tex-common and it asked me which group it should use
for some files.
Yes, this question has been very difficult to phrase, as well as the
first one.
First of all, it's a bug in the previous version that you haven't been
shown this question last time, together with the managecache question.
They are usually shown one after the other, the "Which group" question
only when the first one has been answered with yes.
Please use dpkg-reconfigure tex-common or other means to read the two
questions togehter. Maybe things are clearer then; but I'm confident
there's still room for improvement.
phrased better? In any case, there is no group on a default install
that everybody is member of, so there's no better default.
Except, of course, if you've only got one user in the uid range for
ordinary users - then you'd see a different question, namely:
_Description: Group that should own the TeX font cache:
You can choose a specific group which will own all directories under and
including the TeX font cache /var/cache/fonts. These directories will
get permission 3775.
.
The setup detected only a single user who works on this system. If
this is correct, the best choice is to choose this user's private group
with the same name as the user name.
.
If it is incorrect and more users are supposed to work on this
machine, or if daemons running as system users will use TeX, it is
suggested to choose an existing group, like "users", and add the
required users manually.
(and the group name will already be in the choices field).
But a 'normal' user doesn't have any idea about what's being asked and
what group should be used.
Does that improve when you read it in the context?
Also, a simple enter didn't use the default, although that may be a
bug in the debconf frontend I'm using.
What did it choose instead? In the dialog frontend, it always took the
default for me. readline doesn't display the default, I guess hitting
enter will just take the empty string and give a debconf error message.
Other frontends I haven't tried.