Hi, on the debian-tetex-maint mailing list we often have problems to decide which of the thousands of TeX input files should be treated as configuration files - in principle, each of them can be changed in order to change the behavior of the system. We are currently thinking about a solution were there would be hardly any conffiles[1], but a local admin could put copies of any file he likes into subdirectories of /etc/texmf. This would shadow the dpkg-shipped file in /usr/share/texmf and allow configuration. And of course we would document this.
There is one major drawback, however: If a file that has a (changed) copy in /etc/texmf is changed in the deb, the user gets no notification. This is at least annoying - but on the other hand, many users have newer or changed versions in /usr/local/share/texmf or in $HOME/texmf, and they face the same problem. What do others think? Would it be acceptable Policy-wise to handle configuration like this? Regards, Frank [1] The configuration file snippets in /etc/texmf/*.d/ would be kept, as well as configuration files for tetex-bin's programs. -- Frank Küster Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich Debian Developer