texlive metapackage in dependencies, transitional package (was: lenny release goals and the tetex->texlive transition)

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at> wrote:

> On Don, 14 Dez 2006, Frank Küster wrote:
[...]
>> Fine - this means that we can create a metapackage tetex-bin which
>> Depends: texlive (or the individual texlive components, we don't need
>> ConTeXt, probably), and even use that for Build-Depends.
>
>
>
> In the light of this, do we still uphold the statement that
> 	The texlive metapackage should not be used in package
> 	relation specifications?

I think these issues are somewhat orthogonal.  I still think that
packages that explicitly declare dependencies on texlive-* should check
which individual packages they need, and not use the texlive
metapackage.  On the other hand, from the analysis above that I didn't
cite it seems feasible to create a transitional package "tetex-bin" and
maybe "tetex-extra" from the texlive source package: It's purpose would
be to minimize the havoc on buildds that we would create by dropping
tetex suddenly, but it wouldn't be a long-term solution.

However, as Florent pointed out, we missed the files that are in
tetex-base, but dispersed over the -lang- packages in texlive:  Mostly
the hyphenation patterns.

We've discussed this in the other subthread, and the open questions are:

a) Is the performance affected if we integrate all possible hyphenation
   patterns in the format by default?  Here, performance means in
   particular the loading of latex.fmt/pdflatex.fmt.

b) Since we do not want to drop the upstream collections that make up
   the -lang- packages, is it possible to move only the hyphenation
   patterns around (I think it is), and does this make sense (i.e., do
   the lang packages contain anything more at all, which could be left
   in them)?

We can as well first discuss b), if the answer is no we need not make
performance measurements.  Maybe this even isn't crucial for the
transitional packages, since the documents would still compile without
the hyphenation patterns, i.e. none of the FTBFS bugs that we want to
prevent with the transitional package.  



By the way, is there a document about internationalization/translation
of documentation in Debian?  Maybe that's the place to tell people "if
you add a new language to a document that uses
debiandoc-sgml/linuxdoc-tools/whatever, remember to add texlive-lang-foo
to the Build-Depends".

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