Bug#366907: tetex-bin: Fails to configure, updmap failed

[Ralf Stubner <ralf.stubner@physik.uni-erlangen.de>]

On Mon, May 15, 2006 at 12:40 -0400, Liam Healy wrote:
> To answer what questions I think are being asked of me:
> I do not set DEBIAN_FRONTEND explicitly, I don't know if something else 
> sets it.
> I do not think I have apt-utils installed.  On my computer, questions
> are generally asked while unpacking, I think.

I still don't understand why you weren't informed about the broken
settings in 05TeXMF.cnf. What happens, when you first comment the line
in 05TeXMF.cnf that definies TEXMFDIST and then call

dpkg-reconfigure tex-common; echo $?

? What happens when you do this with DEBIAN_FRONTEND set to
noninteractive? 

In the first case I would expect debconf messages telling you that the
configuration is broken plus a '0' printed to stdout. In the second
case, I only expect the second thing to happen. This should be '1' and
that's the bug that has been fixed now. With this change, tetex-bin
wouldn't have tried to configure in the first place.

Frank, should some more information be given to the admin in the
noninteractive case? tex-common's postinst failing without any
indication as to what's wrong doesn't look ideal to me.

cheerio
ralf