Re: What are the correct (font) dependencies for div-to-X converters?
On Sat, Feb 03, 2007 at 13:04 +0100, Frank Küster wrote:
> 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.
To me this looks as if these packages should depend on a 'minimal
working TeX system', ie, 'tetex-bin | texlive-base' (or the other way
round). The dependnecies as they are now do not make any sense at all,
since there is (almost?) nothing that is provided by both tetex-base and
texlive-base-bin.
> 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.
This might make sense if the user base is indeed known. But for general
purpose packages I do not think that it would be a good idea, since it
would boil down to Suggesting (Recommending would be to much IMO) almost
all packages providing fonts for TeX. BTW, I would expect that about 95%
of the dvi files processed with these tools were generated on the same
system, which therefore had to have the fonts installed.
cheerio
ralf
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