Bug#225833: 225833: letter vs A4 in TeX
submitter 379089 Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org>
# note that this is a different bug, I just came across it
# and will refer to it later in this mail
thanks
Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at> wrote:
> On Mit, 31 Jan 2007, Frank Küster wrote:
>> I'm not sure what your opinion is: I read the beginning of your post as
>> "everything is fine already", but in the end you seem to agree that
>> changing the system-wide geometry.cfg is good?
>
> I am for adapting geometry.cfg
Fine, so most of the discussion is moot. But I'll give some answers
anyway, we all are eager to learn.
>> > I don't think so! It is only that geometry.sty detects pdftex and
>> > activates this feature. Well, in this sense it is useless ;-)
>>
>> What do you think is the use of pdftex? What would be different without
>> it?
>
> I don't know the internals, but probably geometry.sty will not set
> \pdfpageheight and \pdfpagewidht (or however they are called) and so the
> final pdf file will have A4 (or whatever is default).
I've already checked the internals, the only difference that the option
makes AFAICS is that it gives a warning when you specify it and generate
a DVI nevertheless.
>> > /usr/share/texmf-texlive/....
>> > or do we put a file into
>> > /etc/texmf/...
>> > I would prefer the FIRST option to change the system wide geometry.cfg
>> > and inform the users that they can override these defaults ...
>>
>> The first option IMHO violates the Debian policy. If we use
>
> Not agreed upon. We already have a *LOT* of .cfg files in the texmf
> trees. And as stated in the Debian-TeX policy *every* input file can
> change *anything*.
>
> geometry.cfg does not change the behaviour of a *program* ...
>
> What about color.cfg, latexdoc.cfg or however all of them are called.
Have you reread the discussion in bug #379089? It was closed with this
changelog entry:
tex-common (0.27) unstable; urgency=medium
* Policy Change: Treat configuration files properly as Debian Policy
mandates. The only TeX-specific addition is that we remind
maintainers to only treat files for site-wide changes as configuration
files, not files intended to change the typeset output on a
per-document or per-project basis. Consequently, mktex.cnf is now
installed as /etc/texmf/web2c/mktex.cnf. Thanks to Manoj Srivastava!
This closes: #379089, a RC bug, hence the medium urgency [frank]
Now, if we decide that a TeX installation on a Debian system should have
\ExecuteOptions{dvips} in geometry.cfg, this is clearly a site-wide
change (after all, the very purpose is to avoid the need to specify
dvips for each individual document). The consequence is that it must be
a configuration file.
> No. I am for changing the code in
> /usr/share/texmf-texlive/...
> Why:
> - it is a sane default and does *NOT* change the behaviour in any bad
> way
> - it can be overriden on a per-document basis and on a per-system basis.
That it can be overriden on a per-document basis doesn't make
difference. But if it is overrriden on a per-system basis, this is
exactly the reason why we want it to be in /etc: If we later change
geometry.cfg (because we add some parse-libpaper-magic to it, or because
we change from dvips as default option to some new "driver=autodrv",
users on systems with geometry.cfg in /etc will miss this change. To
avoid this, we make it a configuration file.
Regards, Frank
--
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
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