Re: [Gnewsense-dev] Another tex package (texlive-base) to hack

[Sam Geeraerts]

Karl Goetz schreef:
> HI all,
> Would one of the tex users like to hack on texlive-base?
>
> gNS bug report: http://bugs.gnewsense.org/Bugs/00248
> Upstream bug: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=477060
>
> I suspect its much the same level effort as the texlive-generic-extra
> package.

I suspect it's much more effort then that. texlive-generic-extra just 
needed the removal of 1 (deprecated) file (2 files and a directory in 
practice). I haven't checked the source files myself (yet). If it's just 
the one file (pcatcode.dtx) that's problematic, then maybe it's doable, 
presuming that it's not essential. But from the looks of the Debian bug 
report the issue is with all of amslatex.

Best case scenario is then that AMS have indeed cleaned it up. That 
means we'd have to backport a new version (with possibly lots of 
dependencies):

"we are not likely to distribute a new
release without also taking into account the bug reports
that have surfaced since the last release, so getting
something done will take some time"

Worst case scenario is that nothing has changed, so we'd have to remove 
the whole thing. It seems this would not only hurt TeX users badly, but 
might also break other stuff:

"we do not know whether any of these files is used for
building Debian packages"

Just to make things clear for our TeX users: Debian seem to be 
comfortable leaving it in for their convenience because they don't doubt 
AMS' good intent. But our first priority is software freedom and we have 
to act (in the short term) upon what the license is now, rather then 
what it will be some time in the future, even if their intent is 
essentially righteous. Meaning: there is a considerable chance that this 
package will be removed, unless we find a way that.