A heuristic runs via the r-base-core package postinst. It is intended
to use the result from Debian's paperconf(1) toool, and to update the R
environment variable R_PAPERSIZE accordingly. This apparently broke some
time ago when R changed to a dual variable setup, and my regexp didn't
notice.
Does anybody use this, or is it ok if I simply disable this in Debian? In
that case we simply do what everybody else does, so you all get to live by
the 'letter' setting that comes from my compile-time choice. It is easy
enough to override either in /etc/R/Renviron or in ~/.Renviron.
Opinions either way? Let me know. For now, I intend to simply comment this
out in the next release (presumably a rc for 2.4.1).