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



On Sunday 09 March 2008 21:53, Ralf Stubner wrote:
>
> 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.

In Etch tetex-base recommends tetex-doc which recommends tetex-bin.  Since 
aptitude defaults to installing recommends, "aptitude install tetex-base" 
installs tetex-base, tetex-doc, tetex-bin and tex-common, with the last 
three being marked as auto-installed.  (I don't know enough to say whether 
this plus some fonts is enough to provide basic functionality).

When trying to aptitude dist-upgrade to Lenny you get 

The following packages are unused and will be REMOVED:
 ... tetex-bin tex-common ...
The following NEW packages will be automatically installed: 
...
The following packages will be automatically REMOVED:
  tetex-doc
The following NEW packages will be installed:
...
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  tetex-doc
The following packages will be upgraded:
... tetex-base ...

ie tetex-base is upgraded, but with nothing else depending on 
them/recommending them tetex-bin tex-common and tetex-doc get removed.

[Sidenote: Looking at why tetex-doc is listed separately, I found another 
bug. Etch has tetex-doc_3.0.dfsg.3-5etch1 which is a higher version than 
Lenny (tetex-doc_3.0.dfsg.3-5).  tetex-doc_3.0.dfsg.3-5 is built from 
tetex-base source package.  Unless someone says otherwise, expect a bug 
report in 24 hrs].

>
> 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.
>
Well if you're going to ship a transitional tetex-base package, it should 
attempt to provide equivalent functionality for people upgrading from Etch.  


On Sunday 09 March 2008 21:44, Frank Küster wrote:
> 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.
>
If you're going to remove the tetex-base for Lenny, then you should probably 
do so soon, to provide time for people to fix the bugs.  

$ cat *packages |grep tetex-base | grep "^Depends: " |wc -l
10
$ cat *packages |grep tetex-base | grep "^Recommends: " |wc -l
7
$ cat *packages |grep tetex-base | grep "^Suggests: " |wc -l
9
$ cat *sources |grep tetex-base | grep "^Build-Depends" |wc -l
6

Most of the depends and recommends already have alternative dependencies.

Binary-i386 packages with problematic depends/recommends: 
rmligs-german, fweb, opustex, revtex, tth

Source packages with build-deps on tetex-base:
sgb, acl2, cxref, ess, magnus, sbm

Note that simulating dropping the tetex-base package results in the removal 
of tetex-bin tex-common and tetex-doc in the scenario from the top of this 
email.  (The new tetex-bin depends on texlive-common which conflicts with
tetex-base < 2007-11).  

Are there any reasons not to keep tetex-base as a transition package 
depending on either texlive or texlive-base for Lenny, then drop it for 
Lenny+1? 

Cheers
Andrew V.



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