Hi, we've run across a problem with our texlive packages, and I'd like to get some opinions, in particular regarding dpkg behavior.
TeX Live is one big thing upstream (one DVD) and has been split for Debian packaging into one arch:any and four arch:all source packages with numerous binary packages each. Generally, you cannot assume a system to work properly which has a mixture of different upstream versions of these packages installed. But how should we achieve that? A. The straightforward approach is the most ugly one: The packages of course frequently declare "Depends: texlive-some-other-package", and we could switch all of these depends into versioned depends, (>= $upstream-version). But that would really look ugly, e.g. from texlive-latex-extra: -Depends: preview-latex-style, texlive-common (>= 2007), texlive-pictures, texlive-latex-base +Depends: preview-latex-style, texlive-common (>= 2007), texlive-pictures (>= 2007), texlive-latex-base (>= 2007) It would require a really big change to our internal packaging scripts to add such version restrictions only where a real incompatibility shows up, so it would have to be each of them. B. texlive-common could declare Conflicts: <long_list_of_texlive_packages_each_with_old_upstreamversion> But how would that work upon upgrade? Technically, there's no problem, first all texlive packages except texlive-common would be unpacked, then texlive-common could be unpacked and configured, after that the others can be configured. But usually dpkg tries to do unpacking and configuring in the same order; would it be confused by this situation? C. Ignore the problem and just expect from users to handle their upgrades in a sane way and not put individual packages on hold? Of course, other reasons like unrelated errors during dist-upgrade might also cause version mixes, but again the sane thing to do would be to run dist-upgrade again, and not try to use the packages or report a bug... Comments? Regards, Frank -- Dr. Frank Küster Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)