Dear release team, I would like to start a mass bug filing (not yet discussed on -devel, severity non-RC) on packages that depend on teTeX without an alternative TeXlive dependency. This is mainly targetted at lenny, but I would also like to encourage people to fix their bugs if they still plan uploads for etch.
There's a little problem, though: Due to the larger number of texlive packages, it's not trivial to figure out the correct depends, and I think it would be a RC bug to switch from, e.g., correct Depends: tetex-bin, tetex-extra to a buggy Depends: tetex-bin | texlive-latex-base, tetex-extra | texlive-latex-recommended if it turns out that texlive-latex-extra or texlive-fonts-recommended is also needed. Would it be possible to get a "carte blanche" for an etch-ignore tag for any RC bug that - has been introduced by adding alternative dependencies on texlive - on a package that had correct dependencies before that - if the texlive alternatives are listed second, so that the working combination will be installed if no TeX system was installed before Of course, the best thing to do would be to fix these bugs in an upload. However, if the bug is only detected shortly before the package is old enough to migrate, even that would hinder it very much, and therefore this situation makes it unlikely that people fix these kinds of bugs unless they're familiar with texlive themselves. On the other hand, I think that the overall quality of the distribution is better even with some bugs of that kind in it[1], if on the other hand as many packages as possible can be used with both TeX systems (and texlive, the new one, is the one that I'd advice for any user and will use myself). Thanks for considering, Frank [1] a type of bug that can be easily worked around, by documenting the packages that need to be installed manually -- Dr. Frank Küster Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
