Re: Transitional (dummy) packages considered silly
- To: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
- Subject: Re: Transitional (dummy) packages considered silly
- From: Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>
- Date: Mon, 05 Oct 2009 10:55:40 +0200
- Message-id: <[🔎] 87ocomnrsj.fsf@frosties.localdomain>
- In-reply-to: <4AC0C20F.6000404@debian.org> (Emilio Pozuelo Monfort's message of "Mon, 28 Sep 2009 16:02:55 +0200")
- References: <200909172352.27106@proffe.kibibyte.se> <878wg6yrfd.fsf@frosties.localdomain> <87ljk5wojp.fsf@windlord.stanford.edu> <87fxa7torh.fsf@frosties.localdomain> <4AC0C20F.6000404@debian.org>
Emilio Pozuelo Monfort <pochu@debian.org> writes:
> Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
>> Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:
>>
>>> Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de> writes:
>>>
>>>> Dpkg has the ability to vanish empty packages. A dummy package should
>>>> be completly empty and not even contain a /usr/share/doc/.
>>> Such a package is explicitly forbidden by Debian Policy. You need to
>>> propose a Policy change if you want to do this. I believe it was
>>> discussed some time past, and the general consensus was against doing
>>> this, but I could be misremembering.
>>
>> Do you happen to know the chapter/section where that is said?
>>
>> Note that "12.7 Changelog files" does not require a
>> /usr/share/doc/changelog for native packages.
>
> 2.3. Copyright considerations
> -----------------------------
>
> Every package must be accompanied by a verbatim copy of its copyright
> and distribution license in the file
> `/usr/share/doc/<package>/copyright' (see Section 12.5, `Copyright
> information' for further details).
That is already not quite true when /usr/share/doc/<package> is a
link. Maybe that should be worded differently.
I would also not call this explicitly. I do not believe this was
written to disallow empty debs but to state the legal requirement that
every copyrightable bit in Debian needs a copyright and license.
As a though experiment: If you have no contents isn't a nonexistant
file a verbatim copy of the nonexistant copyright and meaningless
distribtuion license?
MfG
Goswin
Reply to: