[Bug 577305] Re: [SRU] Missing dependency on ed causes texconfig to fail silently in texlive-binaries

[Benjamin Drung]

** Also affects: texlive-bin (Ubuntu Lucid)
   Importance: Undecided
       Status: New

-- 
[SRU] Missing dependency on ed causes texconfig to fail silently in texlive-binaries
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/577305
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
Sponsors Team, which is a direct subscriber.

Status in “texlive-bin” package in Ubuntu: Confirmed
Status in “texlive-bin” source package in Lucid: New
Status in “texlive-bin” package in Debian: New

Bug description:
texlive-binaries lacks a dependency on ed that was previously present in texlive-base-bin. Because texconfig uses ed for, well, editing files, this causes texconfig to...no longer edit files, which causes it to silently do nothing, but without returning a non-0 error code.

IMPACT: Attempting to use texconfig on systems without ed installed causes it to do nothing without failing

DEVELOPMENT: This bug still has not been addressed in the development branch, but I've filed a bug with Debian to get the dependency added which will hopefully get synced

PATCH: Attached in http://launchpadlibrarian.net/48042338/texlive-bin_2009-5ubuntu0.1_lp577305.debdiff, with a test build in https://launchpad.net/~anders-kaseorg/+archive/ppa

INSTRUCTIONS: Create a bare-bones chroot without ed installed. Install texlive-binaries. Run `texconfig-sys paper letter`. Install ed. Run `texconfig-sys paper letter` again. Observe that texconfig now gives several lines of output of changed configuration files.

REGRESSION: This is just adding a single dependency, so the regression potential should be minimal

(Note that ed is depended on by ubuntu-standard, so the impact of this bug is comparatively slim, but it does affect things like build chroots)