Re: removal of texconfig from Debian packages

[Julian Gilbey <julian@d-and-j.net>]

On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 10:42:19AM +0900, Norbert Preining wrote:
> Hi Julian,
> 
> thanks for your suggestions, more or less all done
> 
> On Di, 22 Mai 2012, Julian Gilbey wrote:
> > It seems from this list that some of the texconfig features will be
> > lost, most notably dvips, mode-list and mode; their effects are to
> > modify config files that would otherwise have to be modified by hand,
> > and the latter is more error-prone than using the script.
> 
> But nobody modifies or should modify these files at all.

Really?  I certainly did so in the past, when most fonts were
bitmapped and auto-generated by metafont on the fly.  I used mode to
ensure that my printer was well-served.

So what is the current recommended practice - to modify
/etc/texmf/web2c/mktex.cnf by hand?

> > Perhaps there's an in-between solution: for the functions that are
> > anti-the-Debian-way (eg paper, pdftex paper, ...), have the warning
> > message put up followed by exit 1.  For the ones with a simple Debian
> > equivalent (rehash), just do the Debian equivalent (mktexlsr followed
> > by whichever options are appropriate), and the ones like mode, just
> > edit the config files as before.
> 
> Exactely that I don't want. It makes maintaining a pain.
> If someone volunteers to patch texconfig furthre and make sure
> that all cases are properly handled, fine with me. But I don't
> want to verify that....

I'm being stupid here - if texconfig only modifies hand-maintained
config files such as /etc/texmf/web2c/mktex.cnf and non-standard
printer configs, what is the problem?

   Julian