Re: Bug#388653: marked as done (texlive-pictures: new version of dcpic available)

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

owner@bugs.debian.org (Debian Bug Tracking System) wrote:

> Package: texlive-pictures
> Version: 2005.dfsg.1-1
> Severity: wishlist
>
> Hi, the version of dcpic in texlive-pictures is 4.0, but 4.1.1 is
> available from http://hilbert.mat.uc.pt/~pedro/DCpic/ . Although, the
> only apparent change is the addition of a two-headed arrow.

I didn't notice this before uploading, and it doesn't do much harm,
anyway, BUT:

I strongly advice not to do such updates

- first of all, we're opening a can of worms.  Keeping TeXlive
  up-to-date with respect to CTAN is already hard work, and it doesn't
  make sense to duplicate this for the Debian packages.

- second, packages included in TeXlive $version have had considerable
  testing together, at least at the time when we release them as Debian
  stable.  Updating random styles might well introduce incompatibilities
  (what if dcpic.sty assumes a version of, say, calc.sty that's not yet
  in TeXlive 2005?)

- finally, I strongly oppose to doing updates from other places than
  CTAN.  Need I give details on the reasons?

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