Re: Transitional (dummy) packages considered silly

[Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>]

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