[Piuparts-devel] Bug#603068: tex-common, texlive-binaries: can't be installed together

[Sven Joachim]

On 2010-11-11 00:51 +0100, Norbert Preining wrote:

> Dear dpkg maintainers,

Dropping them since dpkg is not relevant here.

> I have a question concerning dpkg-query, it seems that the semantics
> of it has changed:
>
> Currently, when I call
> 	dpkg-query -W -f='${Status}' texlive-base 
> it returns 1 (error) if texlive-base is not installed (or going to 
> be installed).
>
> This breaks installation of tex-common with texlive-binaries, but without
> texlive-base.

You seem to have been aware of that some time ago, judging by the
comment in tex-common's postinst script:

,----
|  # dpkg-query has two defects wrt not existing packages
|  # - it is noisy to stderr
|  # - it returns 1
|  # so shut both errors up
|  stat=$(dpkg-query -W -f='${Status}' texlive-base 2>/dev/null || true)
`----

> As far as I remember in former times this was working, so is this a
> recent change, and was it intended, or is this a coding error from
> our side.

Which you have corrected in tex-common 2.07:

,----
| tex-common (2.07) unstable; urgency=high
| 
|   * work around an under-specification of dpkg-query that makes the calls
|     to it in the configure script break configuration, and thus creates
|     FTBFS of unrelated packages (Closes: #571334)
| 
|  -- Norbert Preining <preining at debian.org>  Sun, 28 Feb 2010 13:13:35 +0900
`----

The question remains WTF Holger's piuparts test was run with the ancient
tex-common version 2.06.

Sven