Re: What are the correct (font) dependencies for div-to-X converters?
Ralf Stubner <ralf.stubner@web.de> wrote:
> 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.
What if someone wants to use dvi2ps to process (japanese) dvi files
created on a different system? They would need the font
finding/creation infrastructure from texlive-base-bin, but not the stuff
for creation of dvi files, nor the standard TeX fonts.
> 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.
Yes, but in this case the dependency is pointless, because for creating
the dvi files the admin will install something like the texlive meta
package, anyway.
Regards, Frank
--
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
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