Bug#528021: unowned files after purge (policy 6.8)
On Sun, 10 May 2009, Holger Levsen wrote:
> > Moreover, we must make sure that we never run mktexlsr without arguments
> > in maintainer scripts - otherwise /u/l/s/texmf/ls-R will be created.
>
> I think that's your duty as maintainers, to make sure the software behaves
> like all the rest, ie follow FHS and in this case, not requiere stuff
> in /usr/local to work.
[...]
> I don't understand (as you see) why you don't do this.
[...]
> Why should the user _want_ a file in /usr/local???
The problem is that it seems you don't have an idea about what ls-R files
are and how they are created.
The semantics of
mktexlsr
is absolutely clear and defined and documented since many years, nothing
to be cahnged in debian. It updates for all trees specified in some
way in the texmf.cnf file that a list of all contained files is created.
Since the normal, default, and usefull setting in texmf.cnf is
TEXMFLOCAL = /usr/local/share/texmf
and TEXMFLOCAL is mentioned in the list to be updated ls-R databases
(also this is useful!) any, *ANY* call to mktexlsr by root will
create the file /u/l/s/texmf/ls-R. That's it.
Ok, one could say that *always* the TEXMFLOCAL tree is searched (specifying
that NO ls-R should be created for it), but then we will bombarded with
bug reports about those having /usr/local on NFS or something else, where
it is really costly to search the full tree of /u/l/s/texmf (which can
be quite big, like in my case here). So that is a no-go.
So there are two ways: Either we create /u/l/s/texmf and make several
other programs working more easily and straight forward, but there
will be /u/l/s/texmf/ls-R and thus it will not be cleaned.
Or we do NOT create /u/l/s/texmf and some programs need extra setup,
and we have happy piuparts.
My sympathy is with the users.
Best wishes
Norbert
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Dr. Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at> Vienna University of Technology
Debian Developer <preining@debian.org> Debian TeX Group
gpg DSA: 0x09C5B094 fp: 14DF 2E6C 0307 BE6D AD76 A9C0 D2BF 4AA3 09C5 B094
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