Re: weekly policy summary
On Mon, Jun 14, 1999 at 11:45:01AM +0200, Goswin Brederlow wrote:
> "Davide G. M. Salvetti" <salve@debian.org> writes:
>
> > ***** JL => Jim Lynch
> > software. This means, IMHO, that free packages should not reference
> > non-free packages in the Debian sense (i.e., suggests, recommends, and
> > depends).
>
> So every Package that uses gif would be depreciated, like gimp. It
> works perfectly without gif, but with gif support a bit better and gif
> support is non-free.
>
> You are right that nothing in main should depend on contrib
> ornon-free, but thats policy already. I'm strongly against
> depreciating suggests to non-free software, sometimes there is
> non-free software that does the job better or just does a bit more of
> the job, like libungif / libgif and then I want to be told that there
The documentation is a better place for this sort of things.
>From the packaging manual:
`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 be related to this one
and can perhaps enhance its usefulness, but that installing this
one without them is perfectly reasonable.
dselect will offer suggsted packages to the system administrator
when they select the suggesting package, but the default is not
to install the suggested package.
My complaint is that dselect offer to install the Suggested package, hinting
to the user to install it: this strike again the Debian spirit.
> is an alternative that I might use. Without a suggest one might never
> know that there is a non-free programm outthere doing the jobs one
> needs.
Again: /usr/doc/package is the better location of information related to
thed package. Suggest is a suggestion to install something to exploit
the usefulness of some package.
>
> May the Source be with you.
> Goswin
>
>
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--
Francesco Tapparo tapparo@mat.unimi.it
GNU fanatic cesco@debian.org
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