Comment 3 for bug 26514

Jens Seidel <email address hidden> wrote:

> tetex-base (2.0.2a-2) unstable; urgency=low
>
> * By default, enable all hyphenation patterns in language.dat [frank]
>
> -- Frank Küster <email address hidden> Fri, 30 Jul 2004 12:55:50 +0200
>
> Frank, I really don't understand why you think including all
> hyphenanation patterns by default should be requested from teTeX
> maintainers in the past.
>
> First of all languages.dat is a config file you knew about. Also I
> remember that LaTeX was always proud to need only very little resources
> such as RAM. And I also never assumed that one little project needing
> minor changes would influence a large package such as tetex.

debian-reference was by no means the reason for this switch. Instead,
the reasons were, IIRC:

- many users found it hard to find the right place for this
  configuration, and furthermore didn't know they needed to recreate the
  formats afterwards

- the code which we provided to make configuration of hyphenation
  patterns more user-friendly turned out to be error-prone

- other TeX distributions also enable all available hyphenation
  patterns

- it was reported that although the format generation takes longer, the
  effect during normal LaTeX runs is very small - and for the users that
  want to optimize even this, language.dat is still a conffile (in fact
  now this has changed again, and the conffile ist
  /etc/texmf/language.d/00tetex.cnf)

> And the most important reason was always that a config file can be
> changed by users so that it was the easiest way to ensure all
> requirements myself.

During package build, it is not easy to do this, and also slow.

Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer