Re: Bug#207932: Consequences of moving Emacs Manuals to non-free

[Sven Joachim <svenjoac@gmx.de>]

On Fri, Mar 17 2006, Davide G. M. Salvetti wrote:
> > > > > > MS == Manoj Srivastava [2006-3-16]
>
>
> MS> Depends is too strong a relationship; if I have several machines in
> MS> my LAN, I may only keep extensive documentation on one of them, and
> MS> use NFS to share share-able directories. I would be annoyed if I was
> MS> made to install loads of documentation on all machines.
>
> This is a good technical point I agree with.  I therefore think that
> recommends would be appropriate.  As per Debian policy 2.2.1, recommends
> will still imply moving Emacs to contrib.

The release team has published a file which lists the release policy for
etch on <http://release.debian.org/etch_rc_policy.txt>.  This file states

	Packages in main cannot require any software outside of main
	for execution or compilation.
	"Recommends:" lines do not count as requirements.

Thus, it seems that the emacs21 packages _can_ recommend the non-free
documentation in etch.  It is still a policy violation, but not a serious
one; see bug #360610 for a similar issue.