texlive-lang-polish fails to install if MATLAB/octave-forge present

[Jonathan Anderson]

Binary package hint: texlive-lang-polish

The octave-forge package (or, on my computer, MATLAB), has an executable /usr/bin/mex. The Polish texlive package (and *only* the Polish one) also has a /usr/bin/mex, so it doesn't install.

[Daniel Robitaille (robitaille)]

The bug report in Debian was marked fixed in May 2006 with the version 2005-2 of texlive-lang-polish, which is the version in Edgy. The solution was to mark texlive-lang-polish as conflicting it with octave-forge, thus you cannot install both of them together in Debian or in Ubuntu.

[Jonathan Anderson (jonathan-anderson)]

I really don't think that the solution is "don't install both MATLAB and TeX Live". I administrate a graduate lab, and when we switch over to Edgy, we will need both texlive-full *and* MATLAB, and I don't think we're alone.

Since /usr/bin/mex is only used by the Polish TeX support (ha! "TeX support"!), the solution is for Polish TeX to call its binary something else.

[Jonathan Anderson (jonathan-anderson)]

Having removed MATLAB and installed texlive-full, it looks like /usr/bin/mex is just a symlink to pdfetex!

texlive-lang-polish has /usr/bin/mex and /usr/bin/pdfmex, both of which are symlinks to /usr/bin/pdfetex (provided by texlive-base-bin). So... can we get rid of this symlink, used only by texlive-lang-polish? The other languages seem to get along fine without having to make symlinks like this.

[Jonathan Anderson (jonathan-anderson)]

Given all of the discussion on this bug (both here and in Debian), I'll call this Confirmed.

Note that the upstream fix isn't really a fix, but a workaround.

[Norbert Preining (preining)]

(Debian maintainer speaking)
Yes, you are right, this is a workaround. If one of you has time to contact the polish user group and discuss this with them we would be very happy, but we have enough other things to do ATM.
Bye Norbert

[Jonathan Anderson (jonathan-anderson)]

I've e-mailed a Sebastien Rahtz (his name was in the Polish hyphenation file) about this... hopefully he can, at the least, put me in touch with the Polish user group that you speak of.

[Norbert Preining (preining)]

Hi all! Please update the texlive AND the octave packages. The current octave packages don't ship mex, but mex2.1 (and mex will go away anyway upstream), and the current texlive packages do not have the conflict.
Bye
Norbert

[Jonathan Anderson (jonathan-anderson)]

Sorry to dig up a dead horse (all the more to kick it).

For my lab (which must have MATLAB, and in which people will have to live without the mex -> pdfetex symlink), I've created a custom .deb package that just doesn't include /usr/bin/mex. I'm doing this with an epoch number.

The problem is, now I need to track upstream changes. Can we, for Ubuntu, have two texlive-lang-polish packages, one with mex and the other without? They could both provide mex, but one would interfere with MATLAB and the other one wouldn't.

[Jonathan Anderson (jonathan-anderson)]

Not gonna happen.