Bug#470118: tetex-base: Transitional package that should depend and/or recommend tex-foo.

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

severity 470118 minor
retitle 470118 tetex-base: misleading description
thanks

Andrew Vaughan <ajv-lists@netspace.net.au> wrote:

>>From the description
>
>  teTeX is no longer developed upstream, and has been replaced by the TeX
>  Live collection.  This is a transitional package to bring former teTeX 
>  users a decent selection of TeX Live packages.  It  can be safely removed 
>  (unless some external packages still depend on tetex-base).
>
> However the package does not depend or recommend any packages, and so
> doesn't provide "a decent selection of TeX Live packages."

This is on purpose. tetex-base never provided any reliable
functionality, at least not for any purpose actually used in
Debian. Therefore it is and it was a bug to depend on tetex-base,
anyway, and we dropped the package completely with the transition to
texlive only. 

However, there were quite a lot of buggy packages which depended on
tetex-base and became uninstallable at once.  In order to lower the
severity of those bugs from serious (uninstallable) to important only
(depends on an empty package bound for removal) we introduced the
package again.

The description was just taken over from tetex-bin/extra and is indeed
misleading. I haven't checked lately, but maybe we can now remove the
tetex-base package again altogether.

Regards, Frank

-- 
Frank Küster
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)