[tex-live] How to handle interdependencies of collections (was: Bug#420394: texlive-latex-extra: acronym.sty requires suffix.sty from texlive-humanities)

[Karl Berry]

    but collection-humanities does not require collection-latexextra.  (In
    fact, it does not require any collection, not even latexbase, but that
    might be because some are generic macros.)

It would be ok for collection-humanities to require "latexbase" (I
assume that is collection-latex in the TL world), but requiring
latexextra would defeat the purpose of collection-humanities.

    Generally I don't expect that
    >> *ANY* cross-package dependency can be fixed but by just making one huge
    >> texlive package.

    What is the TeX Live developers' position on this?  

I agree with the statement above, I guess made by Norbert (who is a TL
developer after all :).

    You generally do not try to get all macro packages'
    interdependencies right, because that would be too much work, if at
    all possible without munging everything into one big collection?

Right.

    On the Debian side, I think we can add a Recommends or Suggests, a "soft
    Requires". 

That sounds reasonable in general, if you want to make a general
statement.  Other possibilities would be to move acronym to humanities,
or bigfoot to latexextra.  I don't have strong feelings about it.

This kind of stuff is why I'm more of a lumper than a splitter when it
comes to TeX packages.  There have probably been more bytes expended in
the email exchange than if everything was in one package in the first place.

k