Re: [PATCH v2] scripts: sphinx-pre-install: Fix ctex support on Debian

[Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab@kernel.org>]

Em Sun, 9 Jan 2022 13:09:19 +0900
Akira Yokosawa <akiyks@gmail.com> escreveu:

> Hi Maruo,
> (+Cc: Jon, linux-doc)
> 
> On Thu, 6 Jan 2022 04:37:07 +0100, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
> > Em Thu, 6 Jan 2022 11:00:08 +0900
> > Akira Yokosawa <akiyks@gmail.com> escreveu:  
> [...]
> >> Longer term (for CentOS stream9 or RHEL 9), we might need to ask
> >> EPEL maintainers to add texlive-ctex.  
> > 
> > Longer term, the script is actually fixing a broken dependency issue
> > on distros. So, bugzillas for Fedora/Debian & derivated ones should be 
> > opened for "texlive-xecjk" package to also select "texlive-ctex"
> > (or whatever other name those packages have on distros).  
> 
> FWIW, I asked Karl Berry, who is the chief maintainer of upstream
> TeX Live, to add a dependency on ctex to xecjk [1].

Thanks for forwarding this question to him and to address it on distros!

> 
> [1]: https://tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/2022-January/047648.html
> 
> Karl has added the dependency to xecjk as of rev 61529 [2].
> 
> [2]: https://tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/2022-January/047654.html
> 
> On up-to-date vanilla TeX Live 2021 (>= rev61529):
> 
>     $ tlmgr info --data depends xecjk
>     ctex
> 
> With xecjk < rev61529
> 
>     $ tlmgr info --data depends xecjk
>     (no output)

Nice! Yeah, this is the long term solution, but still won't prevent
people/distros based on older packages to keep using packages
without such requirements.

> This dependency is expected to be reflected in the TeX Live
> packaging for next Fedora release.

Yeah, Fedora is usually keen to changes.

> OTOH, as I mentioned earlier,
> EPEL 9 (for CentOS stream9) doesn't have texlive-ctex at the
> moment, so we need to see what happens there when RHEL 9 is ready.

Yes. RHEL/EPEL is usually a lot more conservative.

> Note: the xecjk -> ctex dependency is already taken care of
> by openSUSE's TeX Live packages.   

On both Tumbleweed and on Leap?

> As for Ubuntu/Debian, it looks like TeX Live/Debian packaging
> maintainer, Norbert Preining, has no intention of adding
> dependency of texlive-xetex -> texlive-lang-chinese as can be
> seen in his responses to a Debian Bug report [3].
> I think this is a reasonable choice as most xetex users don't
> use xecjk and texlive-lang-chinese is large in size.
> 
> [3]: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=961703

Debian package maintainer could reconsider it after the upstream
dependency addition, but probably only for SID and yet-to-be-released
versions. Debian is very conservative on their releases. 
Even if SID gains such dependency fix, I would be surprised 
if they end porting a dependency change like that to Bullseye
(which should be the latest version for ~1.5 years - with LTS
extending it for ~3.5 years).

It sounds worth mentioning about the texlive dependency decision at
the Debian bug.

>         Thanks, Akira
> 
> > 
> > Worth mentioning that the script dependency-checking is should be smart
> > enough to not break once texlive distro maintainers fix such issues.
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > Mauro
> >