[xml/sgml-pkgs] Bug#328749: Some other issues with tetex 3

[Frank Küster]

Ralf Stubner <ralf.stubner at physik.uni-erlangen.de> wrote:

> AFAICT the problem is that the postinst script looks for the
> format files with extension .efmt when (pdf)eTeX has been used. However,
> the distinction between .fmt and .efmt files has been dropped in teTeX 3
> and other TeX dsitributions, since now pdfeTeX is used for allmost
> everything. Hence I think a bug to xmltex telling the maintainers that
> their package will have problems when teTeX 3.0 is upploded to unstable
> sounds right. I guess, though, that this problem has been considered
> together with the general issue of upploading teTeX 3.0 to unstable.

It's just an other incarnation of the type of bugs we had in Summer 2004
when we switched the engine from tex to etex for LaTeX.

See also 

http://people.debian.org/~frank/Debian-TeX-Policy/ch4.html#s4.3

,----
| Packages that depend on an executable can thus simply declare Depends:
| on the package providing the executable, and only do that. Any
| additional checks, e.g. for the existence of format files, is
| unnecessary and harmful, causing internal changes (e.g. of format file
| extensions) to break the depending package that does this check.
`----

Regards, Frank

-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer