Re: Request for an "etch-ignore carte blanche" for alternative texlive dependencies
Hi,
I've been asked in private mail why we want to do this mass bug filing
at all. I paste here the relevant parts of my answer:
[why not wait until after etch]
We won't push that hard before etch is released, but it doesn't hurt to
fix those bugs now if a package gets an upload for etch, anyway.
[rumors that texlive does not provide identical functionality compared
to teTeX]
I've never heard someone claim that. There are some packages missing in
texlive that were already obsolete when sarge's tetex was released, but
still included in current tetex, but besides that I don't think there's
any difference.
[ the bug reports we submitted so far do not specify exact dependencies
to use ]
Indeed, since this requires knowledge about the internals of the package
that needs more than a cursory look at the sources. The splitting of
texlive is less buggy than tetex's ;-). But I don't see how that can be
a reason not to file the bugs. It might be a reason not to be able to
fix them promptly - and the problem of introducing RC bugs that way is
the reason why I sent this mail to -release.
[ why drop teTeX? I it dead upstream? ]
Yes, it is. Thomas Esser (the te in teTeX) is still contributing to
TeXlive, but no longer putting together his own distribution.
[ why not let texlive Provide: tetex-*, and do "normal transition" ]
This would overload the buildd's and their ftp mirrors, because the
small "texlive" metapackage does not cover the complete teTeX, whereas
texlive-full pulls in really everything, about 2 Gigabyte of files. And
it doesn't make sense to introduce new metapackages that map teTeX's
buggy splitting scheme on the texlive packages.
Regards, Frank
--
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
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