Re: Minor nits about "recent" tex-common changes

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Florent Rougon <f.rougon@free.fr> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm reading the SVN diff for tex-common from last time (~ one month...)
> and found minor things that should probably be fixed (along with trivial
> things I'll commit by myself).
>
> TeX-on-Debian.sgml:
>   - Sometimes, "&mdash" is used, and sometimes it is "&mdash;". I'm
>     surprised the former works. Shouldn't all of them be "&mdash;"?

I guess so.

>   - I believe the convention in American typography (not sure if it's
>     the same in English typography...) is not to put spaces around the
>     em dash---like this. This is not the case in TeX-on-Debian.sgml. Am I
>     mistaken?

I think you are right.  I don't know about british conventions, but it
just looks so strange to me and my "german eye" that I always forget to
leave the spaces out.

>   - There is one place that says:
>
>       Furthermore, there is no built-in
>       merge mechanism at runtime, the files <file>fmtutil.cnf</file>,
>       <file>updmap.cfg</file> and <file>language.dat</file> are
>       used on a first-found-first-used basis.
>
>     but this is confusing, as there is no previous mention of this merge
>     mechanism [for texmf.cnf]. In fact, there is a mention of such a
>     thing, but this is the ucf merging that happens upon package
>     upgrade, not the one "at runtime" that is being talked about IIUC.
>
>     The runtime mechanism is only mentioned later, in § 2.4.3, "Per user
>     configuration changes":
>
>       Since all texmf.cnf files are read, with earlier definitions
>       taking precedence over later ones, it is best to keep only a
>       minimal set of definitions in the user-specific file.

There has probably been a reordering of the texts, either in the file or
in a writer's head.  What about changing this to 

   The files <file>fmtutil.cnf</file>, <file>updmap.cfg</file> and
   <file>language.dat</file> are used on a first-found-first-used basis if
   there are more than one in the search path

> postinst-tex:
>   - a hunk of the diff says:
>
> +	echo "Sometimes, not accepting conffile updates in /etc/texmf/updmap.d"
> +	echo "causes updmap-sys to fail.  Please check for files with extension"
> +	echo ".dpkg-dist or .ucf-new in this directory" 
>
>     Isn't it .ucf-dist rather than .ucf-new that would indicate a
>     refused update for a config file?

You are right, ucf in sid/etch uses .ucf-dist.

> postinst-texfonts (is this stuff still in use?): same thing.

No, no longer used.  I think we should just remove

postinst-texfonts
postrm-texfonts
dh_installtexfonts
dh_installtexfonts.1
dh_installtexfonts.pl

They're all in SVN for future use.

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