Bug#812905: texlive-latex-extra: Documentation package(s) too big for a recommendation
Package: texlive-latex-extra
Version: 2015.20160117-1
Severity: minor
Hello, I'm opening a dependency-related suggestion for the following packages: texlive-latex-extra texlive-pictures texlive-pstricks texlive-latex-base. I see that the Debian TeX Maintainers group is responsible for all of them so I'm just gonna write a single report and hope that it is propagated or at least considered as a modification to texlive-latex-extra only, which is the most relevant here.
All of the mentioned have a corresponding "package-doc" package that is actually listed as a recommended package, which makes tools like aptitude download and install it by default with the corresponding base package.
The problem is that all these together round up to half a gigabyte of download and storage, which is a lot for installed-by-default documentation packages. The solution would be for these packages to only suggest (instead of recommend) their respective *-doc packages.
I understand that it's perfectly reasonable for a package to recommend it's own documentation but in this case due to the sheer size of texlive-latex-extra-doc (especially) I would ask that the maintainers take this request into consideration.
There are also other texlive-*-doc packages recommending their own documentation but I am only mentioning here those with a large download size - around 50MB or more, which is large compared to the size of other -doc packages found in the Debian repository.
If the maintainers think that modifying all or some of the packages from recommends to suggests would then result in it becoming a chore to install all of them individually for the administrator who actually wants all of them installed then an option would be to create a texlive-doc, texlive-latex-doc or both as virtual packages. This way the virtual package(s) could depend on all respective -doc packages so they can all be installed conviniently as a single package.
Thank you all for supporting Debian and the FOSS community!
-- System Information:
Debian Release: stretch/sid
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Versions of packages texlive-latex-extra depends on:
ii preview-latex-style 11.87-3+deb8u1
ii tex-common 6.04
ii texlive-base 2015.20160117-1
ii texlive-binaries 2015.20150524.37493-7+b1
ii texlive-latex-recommended 2015.20160117-1
ii texlive-pictures 2015.20160117-1
Versions of packages texlive-latex-extra recommends:
ii texlive-fonts-recommended 2015.20160117-1
ii texlive-latex-extra-doc 2015.20160117-1
Versions of packages texlive-latex-extra suggests:
ii libfile-which-perl 1.19-1
pn libspreadsheet-parseexcel-perl <none>
pn python-pygments <none>
Versions of packages tex-common depends on:
ii dpkg 1.18.4
ii ucf 3.0031
Versions of packages tex-common suggests:
pn debhelper <none>
Versions of packages texlive-latex-extra is related to:
ii tex-common 6.04
ii texlive-binaries 2015.20150524.37493-7+b1
-- no debconf information
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