The a2gs postinst uses /etc/papersize if it exists or asks the user for the default papersize and writes this to /etc/papersize.
The TeX postinst needs this information too, but it can't rely on an installed a2gs. This means code has to be duplicated which could result in incompatibilities and is not a satisfying solution anyway. Could this be included in the base system? I'm willing to write a dialog based perl script modeled after the a2gs script to do papersize configuration. Any other ideas? A related note: Currently I use dialog in perl scripts by using a modified version of dialog.pl that uses perl5's modular features. The result is Dialog.pm, making the use of dialog extremely convenient. How should I make this file available? TeX postinst (not the current but the coming version containing full dialog-guided configuration) will need it. I asked the dialog author if he is interested but got no response. I'll try that again. Nils