Bug#196582: Upgrading severity.
severity 196582 important
quit
The tetex-bin package asks for permission to 'manage' three files with
debconf; texmf.cnf, fmtutil.cnf, and updmap.cfg. These questions are
asked at priority high or above.
By default, users who do not want (or do not understand what the question
is all about) a Debconf-maintained configuration file, will be relegated
to a quagmire where he will not have any indication that updates to this
file is requred, when installing an additional TeX addon package.
Should the user choose to give up the control of his configuration file,
he will loose control of his own system and will be unable to edit the
file directly, as a HOWTO might instruct him to, without being safe from
update-texmf killing off his modifications.
There's a perfectly good proof-of-concept patch which eliminates all
the disadvantages, yet retains all the advantages of having the
configuration file automatically generated. This has, however, not
spurred the maintainer to even bothering to comment on the patch.
Even though I would agree that this kind of behaviour is a wishlist
or minor issue on a package-by-package basis, this vogue of making
the spurious assumption that "my" package is the most important one
on the user's system, whilst well-meaning, no doubt, will for the user
result in the bombardement of questions, most of them probably totally
uninteresting, when installing and running Debian. A fresh install of
the tetex-bin package with the debconf priority set to 'high', shows
me ten (yes, 10) questions/notes on my 80x24 xterm. On my laptop,
which doesn't have GNOME nor KDE installed, I have 770 packages
installed. Do the maths, and try to imagine how useful I would find
Debian, should half of the packages in Debian be half as loquacious as
this one.
This package is not alone in asking too many questions, a fact that
makes me look at this abuse of Debconf as an alarming trend which
might be a serious defect in Debian as a whole if it is allowed to
continue. Hence, I'm upgrading this bug's severity to 'important', and
hope this will incite some response from the maintainers regarding
the proposed solution as discussed earlier.
--
Tore Anderson
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