Thomas Esser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> schrieb:
>> > 1. VARTEXMF in the man page should be TEXMFVAR
>>
>> By the way, why the renaming? It was kind of annoying for packaging
>> upgradable Packages in Debian.
>
> Given that we have now 6 predefined texmf trees, Olaf and I considered
> it useful to have a consistent naming. All variables are now
> TEXMF<something>.
Well, that is an argument, yes.
>> we would have needed to do this again with the new name. Instead I chose
>> to patch the executables to continue using VARTEXMF).
>
> What a bad choice. That means that teTeX-3.0 will behave differently
> on debian than on all other systems. You also need to update all the
> documentation (currently only TETETXDOC, but I might add something to
> teTeX-FAQ, too).
This is not a final choice. The packages are currently in experimental,
and I don't care for upgrades from experimental. When they will hit the
real archive, we have to finally decide on this, and yes, it might well
be that we change the name to TEXMFVAR as you did.
> What is really bad is that TEXMFVAR is to be set by the user if he wants
> to have a local user-specific configuration (e.g. add his own map files to
> the updmap configuration). Changing the name of the variable is therefore
> a user-visible change which I really don't recommend.
Well, in Debian _all_ configuration is by definition user-specific. This
is why it is so hard to force changes if they are required, but it also
means that there is no sense in discriminating between "ordinary
configuration" and "user-specific configuration". Currently, TEXMFVAR
_must_ be set in order for the Debian packages to work, and the user
_always_ has the possibility to add his own map files (with a slightly
more complicated mechanism, though, see below)
What we need for our tetex packages is the following:
- a static tree where we can put the files installed from tetex-texmf,
under /usr/share
- a tree for variable and generated files, because the FHS requires that
it must be possible to mount /usr read-only during normal operation,
and because it is common practice in Debian that below /usr/share
there are only files that were copied from the package, not generated
during installation (although literally, package
upgrades/installations are not "normal operation" and /usr must be
mounted rw anyway).
We presently use /var/cache/fonts for generated font files, set as
VARTEXFONTS, and TEXMFVAR/VARTEXMF for other generated files, which is
set to /var/lib/texmf. Here, "other" means the format files and logs
of format generation, the ls-R file for TEXMFMAIN, and the map files
generated by updmap.
- All configuration files must be in /etc because of the FHS, and we
achieve this mainly by creating symlinks from TEXMFMAIN to appropriate
places below /etc/texmf. There's one more peculiarity: To allow for
policy-compliant installation of additional font packages and packages
providing additional formats, updmap.cfg and fmtutil.cnf are generated
files sitting in /var/lib/texmf/web2c, and the "real" configuration
files from the point of view of users and maintainers of
add-on-packages are in /etc/texmf/{fmtutil.d,updmap.d} with Debian
scripts generating the files in VARTEXMF.
- additionally, we are considering to add support for one more tree
between TEXMFLOCAL and TEXMFVAR, used for Debian packages that want to
override files from teTeX by providing newer versions and that would
have a faster release cycle.
It seems to me now that these locations are kind of orthogonal to what
you originally intended, so perhaps we should use different names.
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer
