Sven Hoexter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hello, > I'm in the process of packaging dvipost ATM and I'm a little bit puzzled > with the 'dvipost.sty' file coming along with dvipost. > The makefile installs the dvipost.sty file into > /usr/share/texmf-tetex/tex/latex/misc/ > and runs texhash afterwards. > > So I read http://people.debian.org/~frank/Debian-TeX-Policy/ > but could not find something that realy fits so I stayed with the > installation path and put the "texhash" run into postinst and postrm. > > Is this the right way to deal with such stuff?
No, not completely. I'll first tell you what's correct and why, and then we come to the interesting part: How to fix the package's autoconf scripts. Or, no, there's one more interesting part: How to fix the wording of the Debian TeX Policy. You know, we thought that it should be quite clear that this is not correct, and that section 3 should "fit" quite well, especially 3.2. Please read it again, and tell me whether you just didn't read it carefully enough, or how we should change it. So now the what and why: dvipost/sty should be put into /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/misc/ or /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/dvipost/, as you like it. The reason is that /usr/share/texmf-tetex/ is reserved for the teTeX packages (as is /usr/share/texmf-texlive for TeXlive), and it may not even be in the search path if a user has both TeXLive and teTeX installed (or parts of), but wants to use only TeXlive. The most interesting part is how to fix it. The path finds its way into the upstream Makefile via this autoconf macro: AC_MSG_CHECKING(latex environment) if texpath=`kpsewhich latex.ltx 2>/dev/null` then kpseflag="" elif texpath=`kpsewhich tex latex.ltx 2>/dev/null` then kpseflag="-DKPSEWHICH_NEED_TYPE" else texpath="."; kpseflag="" fi It is clearly wrong to search for latex.ltx; the correct thing to do would be to use something like kpsewhich --var-value='TEXMFMAIN' However, things are more complicated, because the correct variable depends on the configure prefix. If configure is run with --prefix=/usr, then, on a Debian system, TEXMFMAIN is the correct path to look for (on other UNIX system, I don't know whether there's a sane option). If configured with --prefix=/usr/local (or without any specification), it should look for TEXMFLOCAL, and if configured to install into a user's home directory, TEXMFHOME. To make things more complicated, --var-value is quite new, in sarge one has to use kpsewhich --expand-braces='$TEXMFMAIN' (which works in etch, too, but it's kind of ugly and not what it's meant for). I think the clean solution would be to change the autoconf script to output the right thing; and autoconf wizards might be able to do this (perl and emacs lisp might have similar problems). However, for the time being, I'd suggest to just move the file after "make install". Regards, Frank -- Frank Küster Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich Debian Developer (teTeX)
