On Sunday 09 March 2008 21:53, Ralf Stubner wrote: > > I am not sure if this is really a bug, let alone a serious one. Let me > try to explain this: The dependencies for the teTeX packages where > such that tetex-base formed the basis of everything, but it did not > provide any useful functinality without tetex-bin installed, which > depended on tetex-base. So in the teTeX world in order to have, e.g., > a functional 'latex' command, you would have to install tetex-bin > which would then draw in tetex-base. In the TeX Live world, these > depencies have been reversed. Now texlive-base-bin is the basis and > different macro packages depend on that. Hence, if you want a > functional 'latex' command, you have to install texlive-latex-base > which draws in texlive-base-bin.
In Etch tetex-base recommends tetex-doc which recommends tetex-bin. Since aptitude defaults to installing recommends, "aptitude install tetex-base" installs tetex-base, tetex-doc, tetex-bin and tex-common, with the last three being marked as auto-installed. (I don't know enough to say whether this plus some fonts is enough to provide basic functionality). When trying to aptitude dist-upgrade to Lenny you get The following packages are unused and will be REMOVED: ... tetex-bin tex-common ... The following NEW packages will be automatically installed: ... The following packages will be automatically REMOVED: tetex-doc The following NEW packages will be installed: ... The following packages will be REMOVED: tetex-doc The following packages will be upgraded: ... tetex-base ... ie tetex-base is upgraded, but with nothing else depending on them/recommending them tetex-bin tex-common and tetex-doc get removed. [Sidenote: Looking at why tetex-doc is listed separately, I found another bug. Etch has tetex-doc_3.0.dfsg.3-5etch1 which is a higher version than Lenny (tetex-doc_3.0.dfsg.3-5). tetex-doc_3.0.dfsg.3-5 is built from tetex-base source package. Unless someone says otherwise, expect a bug report in 24 hrs]. > > So every TeX user had to have tetex-bin installed, and every package > that depended on a working TeX system had to depend on tetex-bin. Now > the transitional tetex-bin package does have the required dependencies > to ensure that a working TeX system is provided. The transitional > tetex-base package is just a technical necessity. > Well if you're going to ship a transitional tetex-base package, it should attempt to provide equivalent functionality for people upgrading from Etch. On Sunday 09 March 2008 21:44, Frank Küster wrote: > However, there were quite a lot of buggy packages which depended on > tetex-base and became uninstallable at once. In order to lower the > severity of those bugs from serious (uninstallable) to important only > (depends on an empty package bound for removal) we introduced the > package again. > > The description was just taken over from tetex-bin/extra and is indeed > misleading. I haven't checked lately, but maybe we can now remove the > tetex-base package again altogether. > If you're going to remove the tetex-base for Lenny, then you should probably do so soon, to provide time for people to fix the bugs. $ cat *packages |grep tetex-base | grep "^Depends: " |wc -l 10 $ cat *packages |grep tetex-base | grep "^Recommends: " |wc -l 7 $ cat *packages |grep tetex-base | grep "^Suggests: " |wc -l 9 $ cat *sources |grep tetex-base | grep "^Build-Depends" |wc -l 6 Most of the depends and recommends already have alternative dependencies. Binary-i386 packages with problematic depends/recommends: rmligs-german, fweb, opustex, revtex, tth Source packages with build-deps on tetex-base: sgb, acl2, cxref, ess, magnus, sbm Note that simulating dropping the tetex-base package results in the removal of tetex-bin tex-common and tetex-doc in the scenario from the top of this email. (The new tetex-bin depends on texlive-common which conflicts with tetex-base < 2007-11). Are there any reasons not to keep tetex-base as a transition package depending on either texlive or texlive-base for Lenny, then drop it for Lenny+1? Cheers Andrew V.
