Sanity checks in update-fontlang

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Hi all,

can anyone recall from memory or the archives why we do those "sanity
checks" in update-fontlang? The script is part of tex-common, and
tex-common ships conffiles 00tex.cnf or 00updmap.cfg in
/etc/texmf/{fmt.d,language.d,updmap.d} and now hyphen.d - and
update-fontlang checks for the existence of those files and gives an
error if they are missing.

Now 00updmap.cfg actually contains base settings. 00tex.cnf contains
only comments in all cases! Is there really (still) a reason to give an
error when those are missing?

I'm asking because I think that the transition from language.d to
hyphen.d would be much easier: The first package to be updated would be
tex-common, and it would ship an update-fontlang which

a) acts as update-language if hyphen.d is empty except for 00tex.cnf
   (which it ships),

b) but as the new update-language-* if hyphen.d/ is populated.

We could still stop with an error if the generated file ends up being
empty (except for comments).

Case a) means that if only tex-common is updated (e.g. because of some
unrelated breakage in that dpkg run), the system will continue to work
as before. We wouldn't need any Conflicts or Breaks related to
tex-common. 

At least I think so.  The only thing I don't know is whether the input
files that require the new language.def and the us hyphenation are in
the same package; if we need to avoid the situation where language.def
is expected but empty, because no pattern files are installed (and hence
no conffiles for them).

Comments?

Regards, Frank
-- 
Dr. Frank Küster
Debian Developer (TeXLive)
VCD Aschaffenburg-Miltenberg, ADFC Miltenberg
B90/Grüne KV Miltenberg