On Fri, Dec 15, 2006 at 08:29 +0100, Frank Küster wrote: > > Are you talking about dvipdfm or dvips here? > > About dvipdfm. I haven't looked at dvips, and it doesn't make sense if > both behave different.
Ok. I was more concerned with dvips here, having put dvipdfm aside as it already used libpaper. So my comments concerning config files referred to dvips. > I guess the patch to texconfig that you wrote is > the better approach. The approach is flawed, however, since it is very easy to construct situations where files in /etc are automatically changed, which we must not do. Hence it is probably easier to make all files that can be changed via texconfig proper configfiles in /etc, as you already suggested. Then we would need the permission to modify these files in some aspects. We could get this permission either via a debconf message (IMO overkill) or by something like this: The libpaper hock script reads in, say, /etc/default/tetex which contains a variable, say, USE_LIBPAPER. By default this variable is set to 'no', which makes the libpaper hock script excit with a suitable message. If the variable is set to 'yes', the libpaper hock script will adjust the configuration files. Needed documentation: Mention this new mechanism (NEWS.Debian and 'TeX on Debian'). Explain that it might automatically change configuration files and explain the consequences, ie, that people should just accept new upstream versions if they did not make any other changes. Really, really stress that this only configures the default output paper size of the various *programs* but not of the *formats*, and that using things like geometry.sty is the better idea. Nice thing would be that no patches for texconfig or dvips/dvipdfm would be needed. cheerio ralf