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

[Frank Küster]

Holger Levsen <holger at layer-acht.org> wrote:

>> Irrespective of whether tex-common has a bug, all those packages are
>> probably buggy, since it seems they depend on texlive-binaries.  This
>> package does not provide any functionality to outsiders. Only with
>> texlive-base can they expect anything usable.
>
> hmmmm: 
>
> $ apt-cache rdepends texlive-binaries
> texlive-binaries
> Reverse Depends:
>   xmltex
>  |xdvik-ja
>   texlive-lang-polish
>   texlive-lang-indic
>   texlive-lang-greek
>   texlive-lang-czechslovak
>   texlive-lang-cyrillic
>   texlive-science
[... many more ...]

it seems we give a bad example ourselves.  In fact we take the
dependency information from upstream, but upstream has no problem
declaring useless dependencies "just to be sure", while we have the
problem that others start thinking they'd get anything useful from
texlive-binaries.  They get a couple of scripts that can be run without
problems, but mostly they get binaries (and scripts) that won't do
anything but complain that their basic input or configuration files are
missing... 

> Should we file more bugs?

Since the bugs don't cause any problem (the packages *will* have
texlive-binaries installed, since it must be pulled in by texlive-base
or whatever), I suggest that the TeX task force tries to update our TeX
Policy.  Then we start adhering to it, and ask other to do the same...

Regards, Frank
-- 
Dr. Frank Küster
VCD Miltenberg, ADFC Aschaffenburg-Miltenberg
B90/Grüne KV Miltenberg
Debian Developer (TeXLive)