[tex-live] should lh depend on ecrm?

[George N. White III]

On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 12:03 PM, Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at> wrote:

> On Thu, 25 Sep 2008, Zdenek Wagner wrote:

>> However, my question was whether the dependencies of individiual
>> packages are stored somewhere in the TL svn repository.
>
> No. They aren't. Mostly because most authors not even KNOW what their
> packages depend on.
>
> We TRY to put package in collections so that the dependencies are
> fullfilled. So in your case both packages should be either in
> collection-latexextra, or the one you are depending on in
> collection-latexbase. But we do NOT introduce single package
> dependencies.
>
> IF someone (again volunteer question) steps forward to write some test
> system that could give us a decent approximation we could *think* about
> it, but until that time, no.
>
> It worked out quite well till now. Consider the Debian packages where
> collections are single packages, we got relatively few complains about
> missing dependencies. Most of them we did resolve.

Linux users have come to expect that they will have to hunt down a
package, e.g. when a compile fails due to a missing header, so
most probably sort out missing dependencies without asking.
MiKTeX users are a bit spoiled.

In my view, the best use of manpower is to refine collections.
In the long run, I'd like to see journals recommending that authors
use collections X+Y and linux distributions including collection
Z in the list of packages for "software developer's workstation".

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia