fancyheadings.sty disappeared

I'm running gutsy, don't know about feisty

fancyheadings.sty is present in feisty's tetex-extra package, but is missing from gutsy's TeX Live package.

I googled some comment that said that fancyheadings.sty was removed from debian's TeX packages because it has been marked obsolete for some time.
This is very ruthless youngster thinking and absolutly unacceptable!
For several reasons:
+ TeX styles has never been removed from LaTeX ever, there is no reason to!
+ Millions of .tex documents use this style and nobody is going to adapt them (which is very difficult btw.!).
+ Thounsands of scripts of old TeX users at companies, academic organisations and so on produce tex documents using this style and it's almost impossible to adapt them!
+ We rather live with old LaTeX than some youngster's stuff that lacks backward compatibility!!!

The fact that fancyheadings.sty is missing in gutsy is obiously true and I therefore confirm it.

Hi!

On Do, 27 Sep 2007, Christoph Lechleitner wrote:
> I googled some comment that said that fancyheadings.sty was removed from debian's TeX packages because it has been marked obsolete for some time.
> This is very ruthless youngster thinking and absolutly unacceptable!

Come down boy ... ever heard about fanczhdr ... if you are so much
better in packaging then do it yourself ...

> + TeX styles has never been removed from LaTeX ever, there is no reason to!

Hahaha ...

> + Millions of .tex documents use this style and nobody is going to adapt them (which is very difficult btw.!).

Send me a list of millions of documents. NOBODY EVER EVER EVER said that
LaTeX is fixed.

If you want that your documents will be processed in THE ONE WAY
forever, write TeX, plain TeX, not even plain format.

> + Thounsands of scripts of old TeX users at companies, academic organisations and so on produce tex documents using this style and it's almost impossible to adapt them!

Really, what about
 s/fancyheadings/fancyhdr/

> + We rather live with old LaTeX than some youngster's stuff that lacks backward compatibility!!!

Thanks for calling me youngster ...enjoy your time and come back when
you have grown up.

Best wishes

Norbert

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First, s/fancyheadings/fancyhdr/ does not help, the headings does not look correct then.

Maybe it's not that much to change, but I still see no reason to kill fancyheadings.sty.

We and at least on other firm I know use fancyheadings in script-generated documents for automatic invoice prodution.

And btw., with 37 I consider myself grown up.

And yes, of course I can just copy fancyheadings.sty from elsewhere, but at the moment TeX in gutsy needs >1 minute for a one-page document that processes in 1 sec. on feisty.

On Do, 27 Sep 2007, Christoph Lechleitner wrote:
> First, s/fancyheadings/fancyhdr/ does not help, the headings does not
> look correct then.

From the README:
| fancyhdr is 99% compatible with fancyheadings. The only incompatibility is
| that \headrulewidth and \footrulewidth and their \plain... versions are no
| longer length parameters, but normal macros (to be changed with
| \renewcommand rather than \setlength).

So if you change this the format should be the same.

> We and at least on other firm I know use fancyheadings in script-
> generated documents for automatic invoice prodution.
>
> And btw., with 37 I consider myself grown up.

Then why was such a rude language necessary??? I would have expected it
from a teen ...

> And yes, of course I can just copy fancyheadings.sty from elsewhere, but
> at the moment TeX in gutsy needs >1 minute for a one-page document that
> processes in 1 sec. on feisty.

??? That is interesting, and definitely worth analysing. Could it be
that the fonts have to be generated?

Do you have the cm-super fonts installed? If not, that could be the
problem. Send me a test document and I can take a look.

Best wishes

Norbert

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First let me apologize for my sour note above.
In the first place I just wanted to know if anyone besides me is missing this fancyheadings style, too.
Then I just wanted to confirm the simple fact, but sometimes my fresh angry thoughts fall in a feedback loop ;-((

Secondly, MANY THANKS for the tips, they work and I have put them in my 2nd brain, aka BLog:
http://www.ibcl.at//ibclweb/ibclweb?page=ShowBLogArticle&service=external&sp=l150

As of the speed problem, I isolated this to some access rights problem.
When I start latex or xdvi as root, they work usually fast, i.e. like a rocket.
When I start them as normal user, they try to do something for a minute or so.
I also have other minor problems of this kind, so I guess it is my fault somehow, and I will [s]trace this down myself tomorrow.

My new ThinkPad is far too new for any OS, as it should seem, so I patched in newer ALSA and acpi_thinkpad drivers, tried several NVidia-drivers, produced umpsteen crashes during suspend/resume tests, and so on ...
Somewhere along this path I might have killed some execute or sticky bit or something alike.
I'll narrow it down, eventually cross check with a fresh gutsy i386 (it's amd64 here), and post any findings somewhere appropriate (and at least a link in here).

Kind regards, Christoph

I solved my performance problem with tex stuff run as non-root, using top and Google:

In this article ...
http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/MacOSX-TeX-Digests/2001/MacOSX-TeX_Digest_11-26-01.html
... from 2001 (!) I found:
--- SNIP ---
- Added '$HOME contains //' check to TeXGSInstaller installation script
(if a directory ends on /, kpathsea can become extremely slow)
--- SNIP ---

Due to certain circumstances (see below) my home directory was set to /home/johndoe/./
After I removed the trailing /./ (and rebooted), latex and xdvi performed well again.

Just in order not be declared crazy, I admit that such home directory settings are extremely rare.
Such as:
1. Certain FTP daemons are taking /./ in a user's home dir as chroot-him-there hint.
2. When doing domain/mail/web/application hosting (even on our small level with some 20 customers) appending /./ to most user's home directory allows to easily chroot them for FTP access while still granting more freedom to a few trusted users.
3. To guarantee synchronity of uids, group memberships, passwords etc. we include most of our internal servers and workstations in the ISP administration system we created for ourselfes.

Despite my extremely rare circumstances, adding a protection towards this problem would definitively be an enhancement after all ;-))

I just spent an hour trying to decipher this error message from plywood, a latex package which I installed after upgrading:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/plywood", line 5, in <module>
    from pkg_resources import load_entry_point
ImportError: No module named pkg_resources

Turns out the culprit (I hope the sole culprit) was the lack of fancyheadings.sty. At the very least, maybe a link to fancyhdr so that this doesn't break outdated packages? Please, latex is not used by people with the time to go re-engineering packages that do their job perfectly well. That's what makes latex good. I don't want to have to think about fancyheadings vs fancyhdr when all I want to do is print out a draft of something that probably won't be published anyway.

I'm certain that I'm not the last person who will have a few hours of headaches over a problem that could be simply fixed by leaving the package as it was.

On Wed, Oct 17, 2007 at 01:13:05AM -0000, luke2760 wrote:
> I just spent an hour trying to decipher this error message from plywood, a latex package which I installed after upgrading:
> Traceback (most recent call last):
> File "/usr/bin/plywood", line 5, in <module>
> from pkg_resources import load_entry_point
> ImportError: No module named pkg_resources
>
> Turns out the culprit (I hope the sole culprit) was the lack of
> fancyheadings.sty. At the very least, maybe a link to fancyhdr so that
> this doesn't break outdated packages?

Can you please file a bug against plywood package? IMHO the bug should
be fixed there instead of linking fancyhdr.sty to fancyheadings.sty.

Ming
2007.10.17

I must agree with the above comments that fancyheadings.sty certainly should not be removed - backwards compatibility is of paramount importance: I must be able to compile my old docs without jumping through hoops. Not including it will waste several peoples' time down the line.

Please do add back this file.

Maybe a transitional period would also be fine, in which using the fancyheadings just displays a deprecation warning.

On Mi, 17 Okt 2007, Tjl wrote:
> I must agree with the above comments that fancyheadings.sty certainly
> should not be removed - backwards compatibility is of paramount

fancyheadings was latex209, it can be found on
 CTAN/obsolete/macros/latex209/contrib/fancyheadings.tar.gz
(note the obsolte AND latex209).

If you want to do this, a simple google whould have shown you that
fancyhdr is 99% compatible to fancyheadings.

> importance: I must be able to compile my old docs without jumping
> through hoops. Not including it will waste several peoples' time down

No need for hoops.

> Please do add back this file.

Will not happen. Put it into your TEXMFLOCAL if you need it so
desperately.

Don't forget: TeX is written in stone, LaTeX is, although slowly moving,
a moving target. You cannot expect that all documents from all times
will compile an all latex versions in the future.

Use plain tex for this.

Best wishes

Norbert

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Debian Developer <email address hidden> Debian TeX Group
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As it took me half an hour's research to follow the TEXMFLOCAL hint above, I decided to create a Mini-HowTo and took the liberty of making the two .sty files available:

These steps make fancyheadings.sty (from Ubuntu feisty's tetex-extra package) available in Ubuntu gutsy and took the liberty of making the two .sty files available:

sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/share/texmf/tex/latex/fancyheadings
sudo chmod -R ugo+rx /usr/local/share/texmf
cd /usr/local/share/texmf/tex/latex/fancyheadings
sudo wget http://www.ibcl.at/files/fancyheadings/fancyheadings.sty
sudo wget http://www.ibcl.at/files/fancyheadings/lastpage209.sty
sudo texhash
sudo chmod -R ugo+rx /usr/local/share/texmf

Voila.

This Mini-HowTo is also available in my BLog:
http://www.ibcl.at//ibclweb/ibclweb?page=ShowBLogArticle&service=external&sp=l151

Norbert, do you see a legal problem with those two files beeing available from my server?

On Di, 23 Okt 2007, Christoph Lechleitner wrote:
> sudo wget http://www.ibcl.at/files/fancyheadings/fancyheadings.sty

I would have created a
 fancyheadings.sty
as follows:
\NeedsTeXFormat{LaTeX2e}
\ProvidesPackage{fancyheadings}
\PackageWarning{fancyheadings}{%
     ============= WARNING ==============\MessageBreak
     fancyheadings is outdated\MessageBreak
     Please use `fancyhdr' instead.\MessageBreak
     We are loading this package instead\MessageBreak
     ====================================\MessageBreak}
\RequirePackage{fancyhdr}

> Norbert, do you see a legal problem with those two files beeing
> available from my server?

No, they are redistributable.

Best wishes

Norbert

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Dr. Norbert Preining <email address hidden> Vienna University of Technology
Debian Developer <email address hidden> Debian TeX Group
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Such a "redirect" style could have been integrated to tex-live ;-))
But I can see that a new tex distribution won't care for all addons of all other tex distributions.

For me and the other people with document bases uses fancyheadings.sty, the TEXMFLOCAL approach is far more convenient, even if we don't like encouraging the use of deprecated stuff.

Regards Christoph

I too would like fancyheaders.sty back. Its used often, and clearly not everyone agrees the obsolete label is correct. Hell, prof's are still insisting at my school (CMU) that proofs are typeset with it.

What is the problem with keeping it? its only 9286 bytes in feisty!

The argument that some other package is 99% compatible is bogus.
Ubuntu is suppose to "just work" (http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/desktopedition).
 Why not focus on an attitude consistent with the ubuntu mantra?

And if that isn't enough reason, there is at least one current ubuntu package that use fancyheadings (removing fancyheaders broke kdissert). Further, doing the recommended substitution does not fix the problem. Please, just add it back. It doesn't hurt anyone to have it, really.

On Mi, 14 Nov 2007, DJB wrote:
> I too would like fancyheaders.sty back. Its used often, and clearly not
> everyone agrees the obsolete label is correct. Hell, prof's are still

The obsolete label is correct as defined by the position on the CTAN
archive in obsolte ...

> insisting at my school (CMU) that proofs are typeset with it.

Then just use fancyhdr instead, they won't even recognize it.

> Further, doing the recommended substitution does not fix the problem.

Really??? There is only one minor incompatibility which can be fixed in
about 10sec ...

For your convenience, here is a dummy package that just calls
fancyhdr.sty instead.

Best wishes

Norbert

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Just wanted to chime in, saying that at our university we also the fancyheadings in a ton of documents, and I would much prefer to waste a bit of space, instead of having to go through all the docs changing the latex source and verifying that the layout is unaffected by the change.

Cheers,
Kenneth

On Do, 17 Jan 2008, kenned wrote:
> Just wanted to chime in, saying that at our university we also the
> fancyheadings in a ton of documents, and I would much prefer to waste a
> bit of space, instead of having to go through all the docs changing the
> latex source and verifying that the layout is unaffected by the change.

We are working on it in cooperation with the upstream author of
fancyhdr. In the meantime put the attached doc into TEXMLOCAL

Best wishes

Norbert

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I have just updated my Kubuntu from 7.04 to 7.10 and was a little shocked to see that one of my favorite LaTeX styles went missing. Seriously: Fancyheadings is described in a number of LaTeX books. In fact, it's part of my private letterhead that I based on an detailed example letterhead in Kopkas current, popular LaTeX beginner guide.

I can confirm that the fancyheadings.sty is not installed withe neither texlive-latex-extra nor tetex-extra packages.

I do not see any reason to declare the packages fancyheadings.sty as obsolete; even
if there is one, there is no reason to remove it from Ubuntu, ever. If not in main packages,
it could be available as 'latex-compat' or similar.

I had to processed some of my older Latex files, and instead of getting a DVI in a
second I had to google for hours to find why the thing does not work. Clearly the suggested s/fancyheadings/fancyhdr/ is *NOT* a solution. Think of the archive files processed off CD...

Please, put the fancyheadings.sty back into some Ubuntu package.

Norbert Preining wrote on 2007-09-27:

>> + TeX styles has never been removed from LaTeX ever, there is no reason to!
> Hahaha ...
> ...
> > Please do add back this file.
> Will not happen. Put it into your TEXMFLOCAL if you need it so
> desperately.

Hmm... this doesn't sound like "linux for human beings", does it? Yes we all *can* put it into TEXMFLOCAL, or install LaTeX by hand into /usr/local/, or make our own .deb package, or
even our own Linux-from--scratch distro -- but then the whole sence in using Ubuntu
vanishes.

The lack of backwards compartibility is a serious problem and hits the usability of LaTeX in general and Ubuntu in particular. Remember all these MS .doc files that could not be
read with the next version of Word? I use(d) LaTeX exactely for the purpose of having my texts available in the future when I need them. Having arbitrary packages marked as
"obsolete" and removed without explanation leaves me (us?) with a bitter feeling...

Regards,
Saulius

On Mo, 07 Apr 2008, saulius wrote:
> Please, put the fancyheadings.sty back into some Ubuntu package.

The next texlive packages in Debian will already contain a dummy package
calling fancyhdr since it was uploaded to CTAN. Things every one of you
could have done, too.

Best wishes

Norbert

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Debian Developer <email address hidden> Debian TeX Group
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I am running Ubuntu 8.04 and have run into the same problem. I have read the thread and have a question. Why didn't you just inform this thread that fancyheadings.py was depreciated in 1996. (excerpt from fancyhdr and fancyheadings)

% May 7, 1996:
% version 1.98:
% Added % after the line \def\nouppercase
% May 7, 1996:
% version 1.99: This is the alpha version of fancyhdr 2.0

% May 7, 1996:
% version 1.98:
% Added % after the line \def\nouppercase
% BY THE WAY, THIS IS THE LAST RELEASE OF VERSION 1.

I think a good solution would be for a file / package error handler that INFORMS the user 'file / package X has been depreciated, use Y instead'. You eluded to this above,

I would have created a
 fancyheadings.sty
as follows:
\NeedsTeXFormat{LaTeX2e}
\ProvidesPackage{fancyheadings}
\PackageWarning{fancyheadings}{%
     ============= WARNING ==============\MessageBreak
     fancyheadings is outdated\MessageBreak
     Please use `fancyhdr' instead.\MessageBreak
     We are loading this package instead\MessageBreak
     ====================================\MessageBreak}
\RequirePackage{fancyhdr}

But this file is NOT included, nor updated, in any standard set of LaTeX packages. If I search the Ubuntu repositories I find it (apt-file search fancyheadings)
tetex-src: /usr/share/texmf-tetex/source/latex/fancyheadings/fancyheadings.sty
When I inspect this it is not the file shown above. The file is a June 1995 version. What is happening?

Nigel

On Mo, 19 Jan 2009, nigel wrote:
> I am running Ubuntu 8.04 and have run into the same problem. I have
> read the thread and have a question. Why didn't you just inform this

A placeholder was added to texlive-latex-base in version 2007-14 in
Debian from 19 April 2008.

So I consider this fixed.

Best wishes

Norbert

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Dr. Norbert Preining <email address hidden> Vienna University of Technology
Debian Developer <email address hidden> Debian TeX Group
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texlive-base (2007-14) unstable; urgency=low

  * fix latin.ldf with the version from CTAN (Closes: #451295)
    (and also closes Ubuntu bug #157709)
  * Update location of upstream iso.zip file in uscan watch file (closes:
    #449619), thanks to Raphael Geissert <email address hidden> [fk]
  * do not install tex/latex/jknapltx/ubbold.fd, it break the bbold fonts
    (Closes: #449221). Thanks and sorry Ralf for ignoring you so long!
  * improve the comments about english hyphenation/language0 in language.dat,
    from DEK on tex-k
  * bump standards version to 3.7.3, no changes needed
  * make texlive-latex-recommended provide latex-ucs-uninames, latex-ucs,
    latex-ucs-contrib as these Debian packages have been given up for
    adoption
  * fix a small bug in booktabs.sty by updating it to the version on CTAN
    (Closes: #460878)
  * add a patch fix-txfonts-precapprox to switch the symbols \precapprox and
    \succapprox in txfonts.sty (Closes Ubuntu bug 184065)
  * add a fancyheadings placeholder calling fancyhdr (Closes Ubuntu bug
    132399)
  * add the LPPL to debian/copyright (Closes: #470479)

 -- Ubuntu Archive Auto-Sync < <email address hidden> > Fri, 02 May 2008 02:27:54 +0100