On Mon, Apr 21, 2003 at 05:53:09PM +0900, Atsuhito Kohda wrote:
> The current texmf.cnf of Debian is completely the same as the one
> upstream teTeX provided, if no local modification files are put in
> /etc/texmf/texmf.d/ There is no specific for Debian at all.
Gosh, read what Manoj's been writing already.
Manoj's concern is that you happyly trash /etc/texmf/texmf.cnf with the
concatenation of /etc/texmf/texmf.d/*.cnf and do not care about the
system administrator's actions.
Your logic is this:
if the previous version is older than N
if there's a texmf.cnf and no texmf.cnf.dpkg-old
rename the current textmf.cnf to texmf.cnf.dpkg-old
endif
endif
trash the current textmf.cnf
So, if there's an upgrade from N + k to N + k' (k' > k > 0), this
reduces to:
trash the current texmf.cnf
Do you see the problem now?
If that's still _not_ clear, think about this:
* The admin has a system in place to administer the boxes in a lab.
* There are TeX components in use which are not provided by Debian
(say, ACM's conference proceeding styles)
* These are installed in /random/path/texmf (/random is NFS
mounted)
* The in-house system takes care of updating every machine's
texmf.cnf files to point to this new path. (And no, this is not a
Debian-only shop, last time I looked there still wasn't a Debian
GNU/Irix distribution -- there's life beyond Debian, you know?)
Now image this: there's security upgrade for tetex-bin and the poor
fool has a cronjob that installs it. After its installation, the local
texmf.cnf is trashed. A local user is writing a paper for a conference
and the deadline is later that day. He runs latex on the paper and it
complains that it can find the style which was working perfectly 20
minutes ago. He's got no clue how latex searches for its styles and at
this point the only thing he really cares about is the paper and the
deadline.
It's 3 am in the morning.
Guess whose telephone is going to ring.
Marcelo
