On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 02:46:48PM -0700, Don Armstrong wrote: > On Fri, 13 Jul 2012, Russ Allbery wrote: > > Don Armstrong <don@debian.org> writes: > > > For example, if foo conflicted with baz, but foo-nonfree did not > > > and baz was installed, foo-nonfree could be installed in > > > preference to foo without the user specifically asking for > > > foo-nonfree. > > > > It seems like it would be difficult for the person adding the > > alternative dependency to know whether this is the case, and it > > could change later without any changes to the package that has the > > dependency. > I believe they could know at the point they added the dependency, but > it could certainly change at some point later in time. That'd just > result in a bug when it was found. I think I'm in agreement with this position, at least until another better argument comes along. At minimum, I agree that it would be a serious bug if installing a package in main ever resulted in a non-free package being installed as a dependency; and I'm generally happy to have this implemented any which way, with the maintainers of the related packages sorting out among them what the right way is to fix/avoid such a bug. > A possible compromise would be to only allow this kind of alternative > dependency on non-free packages which do not have usage restrictions. I don't think that's a reasonable line to draw here, since the entire point of the exercise that if a user has already installed a piece of non-free software that satisfies the logical dependency, they should not have to install another free package to satisfy the annotated dependency. This applies regardless of what kind of non-free it is. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature