Marco d'Itri wrote: > - notwithstanding the disagreement of a few people here, even if > post-sarge eagle-usb-data will have to be moved to non-free, there is > nothing in our policy which prevents to downgrade the hard dependency > to a suggestion, to be able to keep shipping the free driver in main There is most certainly a requirement in Policy to correctly express the dependencies of a package, and consequently, to not allow the package in main. First, from Policy section 2.2.1, "The main section": > In addition, the packages in _main_ > * must not require a package outside of _main_ for compilation or > execution (thus, the package must not declare a "Depends", > "Recommends", or "Build-Depends" relationship on a non-_main_ > package), So if the appropriate dependency from the driver to the firmware is Depends, Recommends, or Build-Depends, then the driver cannot be in main. Now, for the idea that it could be simply a suggestion, see the definitions of Depends, Recommends, and Suggests in Policy 7.2: > `Depends' > This declares an absolute dependency. A package will not be > configured unless all of the packages listed in its `Depends' > field have been correctly configured. > > The `Depends' field should be used if the depended-on package is > required for the depending package to provide a significant > amount of functionality. Given that the entire purpose of the driver is to actually *drive a device*, and that it can't do that at all without the firmware, then the depended-on package is clearly required for the depending package to provide a significant amount of functionality, so the appropriate relationship is a "Depends", which by policy 2.2.1 is not permitted from a main to a non-main package. > `Recommends' > This declares a strong, but not absolute, dependency. > > The `Recommends' field should list packages that would be found > together with this one in all but unusual installations. It would be an unusual driver installation indeed that could not actually drive a device. Nevertheless, even if the appropriate relationship were "Recommends", the driver still could not go in main, by policy 2.2.1. > `Suggests' > This is used to declare that one package may be more useful with > one or more others. Using this field tells the packaging system > and the user that the listed packages are related to this one and > can perhaps enhance its usefulness, but that installing this one > without them is perfectly reasonable. This is clearly not appropriate; it is not "perfectly reasonable" to install a driver package without the firmware, any more than it is reasonable to install a dynamically-linked binary without its shared library dependencies. In both cases, the functionality is limited to simply imforming the user that a necessary component was not installed. > The effect of this is that, as long as the ftpmasters team is happy with > the license clarification from Sagem, you can keep eagle-usb-data too in > main for sarge. Yes, that's correct for Sarge; you may, of course, want to begin working on the issue, since this will become a release-critical bug immediately after the Sarge release. - Josh Triplett
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