> Except that there are a couple of old bugs in the BTS about that, what
> evidence do you have that this issue is actually "widely recognized" as
> a "problem"? And why the proper solution should be to use libpaper,
> instead of teaching users to use geometry.sty or hyperref.sty to include
> the necessary papersize specials in their documents?
The problem is widely recognized enough that there have been, by my
count, nine Debian bug reports filed on the subject, from seven years
ago to three years ago. Most of them have generated discussion. I
would guess that people stopped filing bug reports against this only
because they kept getting closed WONTFIX.
Here are a couple of stories from my personal experience. When I
installed my first Debian system, I was impressed at how everything
just worked. IIRC, I had to fix only two things to get a
fully-functioning system. One of them was to get dvips to use
letter-size paper. (The other was getting ntpd to listen to
broadcasts on the LAN.)
I was motivated to try to fix the paper-size problem for everyone
(well, everyone in the USA) when I was helping a friend who was
totally confused about why his LaTeX document wouldn't print. He had
written a simple LaTeX document and sent it to the printer. The
printer was stopped, displaying the message "Manual Feed". We
eventually figured out it was waiting for us to feed A4 paper (of
course its trays had only letter paper). As we were hovering around
the printer in confusion, a co-worker came by, laughed, and said he'd
be happy to "help" by translating the document into Word, because his
Word documents never jammed the printer. (I hate being laughed at by
Word users.)
People expect the following minimalist document to work:
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\section{Simple Text}
Words are separated by one or more
spaces. Paragraphs are separated
by one or more blank lines.
\end{document}
If an author wants a specific layout, then, yes, they may use
geometry.sty or hyperref.sty, but they don't expect to have to do
anything special to get a basic document printed. LaTeX is all about
simple authoring with intelligent defaults.
It is a serious problem. What's wrong isn't obvious to users. Users
expect all programs to obey the system's paper size (and so they
should). Sysadmins don't think to configure tetex's paper size. Why
should tetex be so special as to need separate configuration? The
result is broken systems, and this situation reflects badly on TeX,
Debian, and free software in general.
My initial euphoria on finding a simple solution has dampened as this
discussion has shown me that the problem is still complex.
It seems to me that having the user configure libpaper, which runs
texconfig-sys and changes files in /etc, is no different from the user
directly running texconfig to change files in /etc. If there is a
policy violation, this patch doesn't make it worse. Perhaps we can
separate the two problems of setting default paper size and moving
automatically-edited files from /etc to /var ?
I'd really, really like to see paper size solved, and I'm willing to
do more work on it, once we agree on what form of solution is best.
< Stephen
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