Re: potential MBF: first alternate depends not available in main

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

Emilio Pozuelo Monfort <pochu@debian.org> writes:

> On 02/03/11 04:24, Scott Kitterman wrote:
>> It seems to me not worth a mass bug filing.  This doesn't seem like something 
>> that would affect user's systems.  Is there a rationale for imposing this 
>> ordering other than puiparts can't deal with it?
>
> If you have non-free enabled and install a package from main, it should install
> the dependencies from main. So you should have e.g. "rar | rar-nonfree" instead
> of the other way round.
>
> Cheers,
> Emilio

I disagree. If non-free has a superior implementation of a package and
the user has non-free configured then it should prefer the non-free
package.

In the case of rar the free version, last I checked, could basicaly
handle none of the rar files in use because only the stoneage rar
formats were supported. Using the non-free version gives a huge
improvement on the functionality.

On the other hand, a case of "Depends: xpdf | acroread" (I had to come
up with something :) should probably stay that way. For 90+% use cases
xpdf is sufficient.


I feel it should be left up to the maintainer which order to use with a
recommendation to list main packages first unless there is a good reason
why non-free should be prefered.

MfG
        Goswin