Release Goal Proposal: texlive-transition
Dear Release Team,
the TeX Task Force proposes the following release goal:
"No dependencies (Depends/Recommends/Suggests/Build-Depends{-Indep}) on
tetex-* and texlive-full, only justified dep's on texlive",
with the usertag-shortname "texlive-transition"
with the rationale:
,----
| The tetex-* packages are now empty transitional packages. While
| tetex-base has no functionality at all, tetex-bin and tetex-extra have
| dependencies to provide users a smooth upgrade experience, and texlive
| is intended for a similar friendly install experience. The specific
| texlive packages on which they depend might be changed during the
| lenny release cycle. Therefore they cannot guarantee any
| functionality in the technical sense, and should not be used in
| dependency relations. Moreover, tetex-* will vanish after lenny.
|
| Depending on the texlive metapackage is only justified when a package,
| e.g. a LaTeX editor or IDE, allows arbitrary input files to be
| generated, or in similar situations.
`----
>>> * Each release goal must be associated with one or two single developer(s)
>>> who should be able to give a status overview when the release team needs
>>> that information.
There will be a page at http://pkg-tetex.alioth.debian.org/, perhaps
regularly and automatically updated, and Norbert Preining and me will be
contact persons - but the contact address should be the mailing list
debiantex-maint@l.d.o.
>>> * The (approximate) number of issues to be fixed needs to be identified
>>> (and most of them should be ready to filed as bugs).
Using grep-dcrtl, I found
> Packages declaring run-time relationships to
> tetex-base: 36
> tetex-bin: 119
> tetex-extra: 61
> tetex-doc: 1
> texlive: 2
>
> Packages declaring build-time relationships to
> tetex-base: 9
> tetex-bin: 191
> tetex-extra: 134
(at least one is a false positive, the tetex-bin metapackage correctly
"Depends: texlive").
There are already a couple of bugs filed, but we didn't do it
systematically yet. That's because we were busy with our own packages,
but these look stable and working now.
>>> * There needs to be a long-term strategy to fix all filed bugs. If
>>> possible, all bugs should be filed with a patch or some instructions
>>> how to solve the problem.
Instructions are alread available at
http://pkg-tetex.alioth.debian.org/mapping-texlive.html but we won't be
able to write 400 patches ourselves.
In most cases, it won't be hard for the maintainer, since there's a
receipe on that page how to find the right packages.
[Note that some of the bugs are already filed and RC, in particular those
which build-depend on texinfo and tetex-bin and have the "epsf.tex not
found" FTBFS problem. Those are trivial to fix.]
>>> * There needs to be a long-term strategy that prevents new occurences of
>>> this issue.
I don't know which kind of strategy we could name here - something like
introducing a lintian check? Or just regularly updating the list of
affected packages, and larting maintainer of newcomers?
Regards, Frank
P.S. I've seen important bugs show up on http://bts.turmzimmer.net/,
that's probably they are related to release goals? Would be nice if
that was indicated even in the overview (didn't check in the detailed
list), something like "new (release goal)".
P.P.S. Martin, I didn't hear from you about the "who's contact for the
TeX team" question, I guess that's just because you were busy, not
because my two e-mails got lost?
--
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
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