Hi Ken,
Ken Brown writes:
1. When creating the various texlive-collection-* packages, instead of
creating postinstall scripts, I would drop files into
/usr/share/texmf-dist/postinstall containing the postinstall
information.
Exactly, although you could change that place of course (I've started
with /etc/postinstall/texlive.d/, but that looked too wierd to me and
I've moved it to texmf-dist). And removing a package removes that file
again from there.
2. There would be a new package, say _texlive-postinstall, which would
take care of the postinstall tasks, with arguments lumped together
when possible. I guess the various files in
/usr/share/texmf-dist/postinstall would have to be renamed (with the
addition of ".done"?) afterwards.
There are multiple possibilities: you could provide the postinstall
script via an extra package that is automagically updating like
autorebase or update_info and make that postinstall package a dependency
(although I don't think that would be appropriate here, all things
considered).
Or you could drop the same postinstall script from all texlive packages
that need one, so you'd overwrite that script multiple times when more
than one package is selected (this seems the easiest way to do it to
me).