I investigated further. It turns out that tetex-bin (which tetex-base and
tetex-extra depend on) has conflicts with:
debconf 1.4.70.osso2
sed 4.1.2-8
coreutils 5.2.1-2osso1
debianutils 2.17
Further investigation indicates that there are two root conflicts. The first is
that the standard installation includes a package fakedebconf which replaces
debconf with a script that doesn't ask any questions and always answers yes
for the defaults. fakedebconf conflcts with debconf and tetex-bin depends on
debconf. The second is that the standard installation includes a package
called busybox. Busybox is a lightweight replacement for things like sh, cp,
mv, ls, ... providing a compatible subset of the functionality with less
memory footprint. It conflicts with sed, coreutils, and debianutils.
I suspect that tetex-bin will work just fine with fakedebconf and busybox.
Is there a way to force it to ignore the conflicts and go ahead and install
anyway? Alternatively, could I replace fakedebconf with the real debconf and
busybox with the real tools? Then I would have to figure out all of the
packages that I would need to install to cover the busybox functionality. And
deinstalling fakedebconf and busybox might cause a chain reaction deinstalling
almost the whole system.
Any ideas?
Jeff (http://www.ece.purdue.edu/~qobi)
