Re: reopening after discussion on IRC

[Frank Küster <frank@kuesterei.ch>]

[tetex-bin and texlive-base-bin both provide dvipdfm, confusing sbuild]

Lucas Nussbaum <lucas@lucas-nussbaum.net> wrote:

> reopen 393734
> severity 393734 important
> thanks
>
> <lucas> vorlon: should I reopen #393734 ?
> <vorlon> lucas: I'm inclined to say yes, but downgraded
> <lucas> ok, will do that
> <vorlon> it's bad that sbuild parses the build-deps in such a
> way that it picks an uninstallable combination
> <vorlon> but it's an arch: all package, so it doesn't really
> have to build with sbuild specifically

dvipdfm never was meant to be a virtual package.  It dissappeared in the
woody->sarge transition, and no package in sarge or etch should ever
depend on it.  Since tetex took it over, it "Provides" it (and I guess
it also Conflicts/Replaces, but things might be more complicated if
tetex-base and -bin together are needed to replace it, I didn't check.)

Therefore, the real bugs behind this problem, besides sbuild's build-dep
parsing, are that

- debian-zh-faq Build-Depends on the obsolete package dvipdfm

- and maybe it's also not a good idea that texlive-base-bin choose to
  Provide this package, too.

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