Bug#470118: tetex-base: Transitional package that should depend and/or recommend tex-foo.
Hi Andrew,
On Sun, Mar 09, 2008 at 19:45 +1100, Andrew Vaughan wrote:
> Package: tetex-base
> Version: 2007-13
> Severity: serious
>
> Hi
>
> >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 teTeX is no longer developed upstream, and has been replaced by the TeX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."
I am not sure if this is really a bug, let alone a serious one. Let me
try to explain this: The dependencies for the teTeX packages where
such that tetex-base formed the basis of everything, but it did not
provide any useful functinality without tetex-bin installed, which
depended on tetex-base. So in the teTeX world in order to have, e.g.,
a functional 'latex' command, you would have to install tetex-bin
which would then draw in tetex-base. In the TeX Live world, these
depencies have been reversed. Now texlive-base-bin is the basis and
different macro packages depend on that. Hence, if you want a
functional 'latex' command, you have to install texlive-latex-base
which draws in texlive-base-bin.
So every TeX user had to have tetex-bin installed, and every package
that depended on a working TeX system had to depend on tetex-bin. Now
the transitional tetex-bin package does have the required dependencies
to ensure that a working TeX system is provided. The transitional
tetex-base package is just a technical necessity.
Do you (or somebody else) have any suggestion how to improve the
wording of the description? Otherwise I would suggest to close this
bug.
cheerio
ralf
Reply to: