Remnants of upgrade from Ubuntu Hardy to Intrepid

The upgrade (via update-manager) from Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 LTS to Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10 went smoothly. I started the upgrade, went to get some lunch and it was mostly done by the time I got back. This is mostly thanks to the local mirror on our campus network.

However I noticed that for some reason it was marking the package called “texlive-fonts-recommended” for removal (apart from other packages). I went along with the suggested removal, but made a mental note of this.

I am using LaTeX quite heavily these days (I am supposedly writing a paper and my thesis). Hence I noticed immediately after the upgrade that simple LaTeX documents would not compile anymore and throw up the following error:

$ latex thesis.tex
[snip]
(/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/latex/psnfss/ot1ptm.fd)
kpathsea: Running mktextfm ptmr7t
mktextfm: Running mf-nowin -progname=mf \mode:=ljfour; mag:=1; nonstopmode; input ptmr7t
This is METAFONT, Version 2.71828 (Web2C 7.5.6)

kpathsea: Running mktexmf ptmr7t
! I can't find file `ptmr7t'.
<*> ...:=ljfour; mag:=1; nonstopmode; input ptmr7t

Please type another input file name
! Emergency stop.
<*> ...:=ljfour; mag:=1; nonstopmode; input ptmr7t

Transcript written on mfput.log.
grep: ptmr7t.log: No such file or directory
mktextfm: `mf-nowin -progname=mf \mode:=ljfour; mag:=1; nonstopmode; input ptmr7t' failed to make ptmr7t.tfm.
kpathsea: Appending font creation commands to missfont.log.

! Font OT1/ptm/m/n/12=ptmr7t at 12.0pt not loadable: Metric (TFM) file not foun
d.
<to be read again>
relax
l.56 \begin{document}

? x
No pages of output.
Transcript written on thesis.log.

Clearly there was something wrong with the fonts subsystem of TeX/LaTeX. I tried to correct this by (recalling my mental note) installing the “texlive-fonts-recommended” package:

$ sudo apt-get install texlive-fonts-recommended

This fixed the problem and I am back to my thesis. Just to check, I tried removing (purging) the package, and the errors returned. Installing the package again fixed it again, as expected. This sure sounds like a bug (removal of a required package during upgrade). If more people have faced this problem, then leave a comment/ trackback here and we should file this as a bug. I don’t have the (mental) bandwidth for doing the bug-filing now, hence this informal report.