Bug#681419: Proposed ballot for free/non-free dependencies question
Hi Colin, everyone,
On Thursday 25 October 2012 09:05:30 Colin Watson wrote:
> Here's a draft of a ballot for #681419. Despite the form, I think this
> is probably still more of a discussion document; Ian indicated that he'd
> like the opportunity to discuss this by e-mail before voting, and I
> don't know if I've fully captured all the positions and arguments.
[...]
> Whereas:
>
> 1. The Debian Policy Manual states (§2.2.1) that packages in main
> "must not require or recommend a package outside of main for
> compilation or execution". Both "Depends: package-in-non-free" and
> "Recommends: package-in-non-free" clearly violate this requirement.
> The Technical Committee has been asked to determine whether a
> dependency of the form "package-in-main | package-in-non-free"
> complies with this policy requirement, or whether virtual packages
> must instead be used to avoid mentioning the non-free alternative.
I think I must note something that I find rather important, before it is too
late: the current tech-ctte discussion revolves only around non-free.
My proposed wording on the policy bug, and later Russ' wording that I
seconded, both talk about packages *not in main*.
To spell it out: the original discussion in the policy bug report also
covered packages in contrib while the current discussion doesn't.
Oh, and while I personally disagree with the use of virtual packages in the
way proposed by option B of the ballot, I think it should make it clear that
the virtual package name must not be the name of a real package.
That is, I ask the comittee to explicitely disallow cases such as the
example of package "foo" in http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?msg=17;bug=587279
Cheers,
--
Raphael Geissert - Debian Developer
www.debian.org - get.debian.net
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