Bug#438551: xdvi doesn't work

[Frank Küster <frank@kuesterei.ch>]

Andreas Degert <ad@papyrus-gmbh.de> wrote:

> On Sat, 18 Aug 2007 13:36:22 +0200
> Frank Küster <frank@debian.org> wrote:
>
>> Andreas Degert <ad@papyrus-gmbh.de> wrote:
>> 
>> > xdvi wants to use xdvi.bin which is not included in the package.
>> > Symlinking from xdvi.bin to xdvi-xaw.bin in /usr/bin makes it work.
>> 
>> The symlink is supposed to go this way:
>> 
>> /usr/bin/xdvi.bin -> /etc/alternatives/xdvi.bin
>> /etc/alternatives/xdvi.bin -> /usr/bin/xdvi-xaw.bin
>> 
>> (unless you have one of the far-eastern language support packages
>> installed), and these symlinks are generated by update-alternatives.
>> What is the output on your system of
>> 
>> update-alternatives --display xdvi.bin
>
> xdvi.bin - status is manual.
>  link currently absent
> /usr/bin/xdvi-xaw.bin - priority 30
> Current `best' version is /usr/bin/xdvi-xaw.bin.

This means that update-alternatives thinks you chose to handle the xdvi
alternative manually, and moved symlinks around yourself.  Of course, it
could also be that some script that you ran did this.  

Do you remember anything of that sort?

> hmm... I just looked what the postinst is doing, you are grepping for
> "status is manual"... since I installed texlive-base-bin in a
> LANG=de_DE environment, the text output is different (the above output
> was produced with LANG=C to make it readable in english, now I realize I
> accidentally removed the most important bit of information ;-)

That's a good point, thank you for noticing this.  However, it cannot
explain how your alternatives got into manual mode in the first place. 

> What do you think of changing
>
> if update-alternatives --display xdvi.bin | grep -q "status is manual" ; then
>     if update-alternatives --display xdvi.bin | grep -q "link currently points to /usr/bin/xdvi.real" ; then
>
> to something like
>
> xdvi_alternatives () {
>   LANG=C update-alternatives --display xdvi.bin  | grep -q "$1"
> }
> if xdvi_alternatives "status is manual"; then
>      if xdvi_alternatives "link currently points to /usr/bin/xdvi.real"; then

Thank you, that seems to be a good workaround.  The real solution,
however, would be to add to update-alternatives an option which outputs
information similar to --display in a machine-readable, non-localized
format. 

Regards, Frank

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