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.