Bug#420394: How to handle interdependencies of collections (was: Bug#420394: texlive-latex-extra: acronym.sty requires suffix.sty from texlive-humanities)

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Hi,

we've got a bug report against the Debian texlive packages:

> Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at> wrote:
>
>> Hi Jörg, hi all!
>>
>> $subject =
>> 	texlive-latex-extra: acronym.sty requires suffix.sty from
>> 	texlive-humanities

Translating this from Debian to TeXLive language this means: acronym.sty
in collection-latexextra requires suffix.sty from collection-humanities,
but collection-humanities does not require collection-latexextra.  (In
fact, it does not require any collection, not even latexbase, but that
might be because some are generic macros.)

>> How should we deal with this type of bugs? Generally I don't expect that
>> *ANY* cross-package dependency can be fixed but by just making one huge
>> texlive package.

What is the TeX Live developers' position on this?  You generally do not
try to get all macro packages' interdependencies right, because that
would be too much work, if at all possible without munging everything
into one big collection?

On the Debian side, I think we can add a Recommends or Suggests, a "soft
Requires". 

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