Accepted auctex 11.83-7ubuntu1 (source)

[Michael Vogt]

On Fri, Oct 05, 2007 at 06:52:44PM +0200, Martin Pitt wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Michael Vogt [2007-10-05 16:25 -0000]:
> >  auctex (11.83-7ubuntu1) gutsy; urgency=low
> >  .
> >    * add missing depends on texlive-base-bin so that the postrm
> >      does not fail on missing mktexlsr (LP: #148469)
> 
> That is not a very good approach. In the postrm you can generally not
> assume that dependencies are still installed (at least not in purge).
> It might be more robust to "|| true" the command?

Right, purge may be problematic with this change so in addition to it
a || true is probably best. But the change will ensure the upgrade
works and that is my primary concern. I also do not know enough about
tetex/texlive to know the implications of calling or not calling
mktexlsr.

Its a good example for the weaknesses in our current packaging
system. Silly things like this can break upgrades. We do a lot better
these days than we used to be when it comes to the robustness of the
upgrade and the user who upgraded had only a broken auctex after the
upgrade, but the fact that we have maintainer scripts with loads of
copied code, more complexity than needed and assumptions that may not
be true (especially during a upgrade) make the whole process more
fragile than it needs to be. 

Unfortunately I have no easy solution for this, it is just my
observation from spending a lot of time reading upgrade failure bug
reports. Moving as much complexity out of maintainer scripts and
making them as robust as possible is probably a good start. 

Cheers,
 Michael