[xml/sgml-pkgs] Bug#531405: xmlto: please don't recommend dblatex

[Daniel Leidert]

Am Montag, den 01.06.2009, 03:14 -0700 schrieb Steve Langasek:

JFTR: There is already a report about this (#519389), where this has
been discussed. Merging.

> When preparing to do a dist-upgrade, I found that something on my system was
> trying to pull in the entire texlive suite.  This something turned out to be
> xmlto, which has a new Recommends: on dblatex.
> 
> Policy says about Recommends that:
> 
>     The `Recommends' field should list packages that would be found
>     together with this one in all but unusual installations.

The PDF/PS/DVI formats can be produced via dblatex, passivetex or fop
(with docbook-xsl). The last one was in contrib for a long time and has
been moved to Suggests for this reason [1]. The second is buggy. dblatex
was the only working one and I expect, that users of xmlto want to have
PDF/PS/DVI support in a common installation.

> I don't think it's at all unusual to want to use xmlto without having to
> pull in all of texlive, so I think this package relationship should be
> demoted to a Suggests.

NACK. You can ignore Recommends if you know what you are doing.
Everybody else expects a full working xmlto.

Installation of the toolchains is not enforced and you have the choice
to disable/ignore Recommends-installation. I therefor leave this as
wontfix. I fail to see compelling reasons to downgrade the package
relationship further (it is already a Recommends and not a Depends).

[1] Now that it is back in main I plan to move it back to Recommends.

Regards, Daniel