Re: (post-Etch) Turning tetex-* packages into dummy dependency metapackages
"Kevin B. McCarty" <kmccarty@Princeton.EDU> wrote:
> Dear TeX maintainers,
>
> I guess at some point after the release of Etch, since teTeX no longer
> has an upstream, one might want to replace the tetex-* packages with
> dummy metapackages that are empty, but depend upon the relevent
> texlive-* packages. This would permit a smooth upgrade Etch -> Lenny
> for the people who stuck with teTeX through Etch.
>
> I spent some time to come up with lists of which TeXLive Debian packages
> may substitute for the tetex-base and tetex-bin Debian packages.
Thanks for your work. This is a very good starting point.
However, I'm not yet sure this is the way we want to go. And maybe even
less after looking at lists like this:
> Files from tetex-base would be (nearly) completely replaced, except as
> noted below, by installation of the following packages:
>
[...]
> These can be condensed to the following dependency list after taking
> their interdependencies into account:
>
> texlive-latex-recommended, texlive-latex-extra, texlive-bibtex-extra,
> texlive-math-extra, texlive-publishers, texlive-context, texlive-omega,
> texlive-font-utils, texlive-extra-utils, texlive-fonts-extra,
> texlive-formats-extra, texlive-plain-extra, texlive-generic-recommended,
> texlive-generic-extra, texlive-lang-polish, texlive-lang-vietnamese,
> texlive-lang-african, texlive-lang-tibetan, texlive-lang-cyrillic,
> texlive-lang-greek, texlive-lang-czechslovak, texlive-lang-german
At least for the packages that build-depend on tetex, I think it's worth
the effort to bug the maintainers to choose the minimal set of needed
texlive packages manually. Whether we also manage this for
Depends/Recommends is a different story (and will, e.g., depend on the
extent I'll be still involved in maintenance next year, with (I hope) a
new job). But for the buildds, I'd really like to avoid the extra load
of installing all that stuff.
> Note that tetex-bin Provides the following virtual packages:
> - cweb (already also provided by texlive-extra-utils)
> - ctie (already also provided by texlive-extra-utils)
> - texdoctk (already also provided by texlive-base-bin)
> - dvipdfm (nothing else provides this, and alml depends upon it; it
> should be provided [I guess] by texlive-base-bin, which
> includes /usr/bin/dvipdfm)
No, rather tetex-bin should stop providing dvipdfm, and any package
depending on it should choose proper dependencies. dvipdfm was never
meant to be a virtual package, there's no defined functionality and
nothing. It just existed as a separate package in woody, and since
teTeX took over, tetex-bin Conflicts/Replaces/Provides it.
Regards, Frank
--
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
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