On Tue, Dec 24, 2024 at 11:52:17PM +0100, Vincent Lefevre wrote: > With the new libpaper, which has changed libpaper1 to libpaper2, > the Recommends of libpaper1 in groff will no longer be satisfied. > So a change is needed. But better than libpaper2, I think that > libpaper-utils (which is a very small package that depends on > libpaper*) should be used. [...] > But if the user wishes to change /etc/papersize, he should use the > paperconfig utility from libpaper-utils, so that packages can be > notified about this change. Such packages should already depend on > libpaper-utils, but it is not a good idea to give the user a bad > habit when such packages are not installed yet. > > Alternatively, it could be decided not to recommend anything related > to libpaper. Shouldn't groff use a method that does not need to be > root to choose the paper size (such as the PAPERSIZE / PAPERCONF > environment variables as used by libpaper)?
On Wed, Dec 25, 2024 at 00:08:23AM +0100, Guillem Jover wrote: > The current groff version Recommends libpaper1, I think as a way to > try to have by default /etc/papersize installed. With the latest > libpaper release which bumped the SONAME, the Recommends is preventing > the old package from being removed. The new library also no longer > creates the /etc/papersize file, so pulling that dependency will not > give any additional guarantees that the file might be present. The > admin might create it though and libpaper will honor it (AFAICS from > the source), but otherwise I think the preferred way to configure this > is probably though LC_PAPER. > > I think instead of updating the dependency from libpaper1 to libpaper2 > the better fix might be to simply drop this dependency against a > dynamic library that groff does not even link against, and which no > longer ships what groff expects? I think you're both right that this should accept configuration via environment variables, but I'm reluctant to add that sort of thing as a downstream distributor. I'm just going to drop the Recommends for the moment, and if upstream adds environment variable support at some point then we'll pick that up. I filed https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?66597 with upstream to suggest libpaper integration. Note my comment there that you _can_ select the paper size without needing to be root, using groff options such as "-P-pa4". Thanks, -- Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwat...@debian.org]
