Oded Shimon wrote: > Not sure if this is the best place to ask this: debian-legal is indeed the appropriate list for such questions. > I built a program, and am now working on a creating a Debian package for it. > the program is an MEncoder frontend, and it depends on MPlayer to work > (without it, it would crash on startup). > > MPlayer is not in the debian archives, from what I understand because of > patents. I put MPlayer as a 'Suggests' in my program. If your program requires MPlayer to work, and crashes on startup without it, then Suggests is inappropriate; you should have a Depends on mplayer. > My question is, where does my program belong? contrib, or main? contrib. >From Policy section 2.2.1, "The main section": [...] > 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), [...] Your program requires a package outside of main for execution (and should have a Depends for that reason), so it cannot go in main. Hopefully, MPlayer will be accepted into the archive someday, so that this will not continue be an issue in the future. - Josh Triplett
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