What are the correct (font) dependencies for div-to-X converters?

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Hi,

this is a question in particular for our font people.

I have discovered that there a couple of packages, in particular dvi2ps
and dvipng, which depend on tetex-base | texlive-base-bin, although they
need the mktexpk executable from tetex-bin.

Now, if I send patches that just change tetex-base to tetex-bin, the
converter will still not work with most documents on a texlive system,
because neither Computer Modern nor any of the basic postscript fonts is
in tl-base-bin or one of it's dependencies.

So the question is: To what extent should dependencies reflect the need
for fonts?  I'm inclined to say that these packages should Suggest or
Recommend font packages, but not Depend on them.  Specifically, dvi2ps
is used for japanese/far-east typesetting which might use totally
different fonts and not need CM at all.

What do you think?

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