Bug#225833: Letter vs A4 again

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu> wrote:

> Really, arguing that your bug is a feature is just unsightly. If what you
> describe was universally a good idea then the right thing to do would be to
> make TeX documents require a paper size definition. It doesn't work that way

Yes, and that's a bug in LaTeX.  I expect this will change in LaTeX 3.0;
it will probably by default write papersize specials.  In LaTeX 2e, it
won't change since this would be an incompatible change (and because
there are lots of good alternatives).

> and unless you can convince people to make it work that way

I don't think there's a need to convince people.

> and eliminate all
> system-wide configuration then the Debian package should strive to configure
> itself reasonably as the sysadmin and users expect. 

You still didn't understand:  It doesn't make sense to configure
*the*Debian*package*.  You have to configure *each*document*.
Everything else leads to non-portability hell.  

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)