Bug#620109: Policy §3.5 (on Pre-Depends) does not reflect actual practice
On Wed, 30 Mar 2011, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
> Package: debian-policy
> Version: 3.9.1.0
>
> Raphael Hertzog wrote[1]:
>
> > It has been discussed on -release, not on -devel:
> > http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2011/02/threads.html#00381
> >
> > (I don't think it matters much given that all important stakeholders where
> > involved)
>
> No strong objection from me. I guess that suggests we should change
> policy §3.5 at the same time (to permit discussion of Pre-Depends on
> debian-release as an alternative to debian-devel, for example)?
I don't think so. The reason the discussion started on debian-release was
because the initial solution involved a dependency bump on libc6 (and
would affect migrability of packages). Using the Pre-Depends on the
multiarch-support package was later identified as an elegant solution to
avoid this.
That's why it was discussed there. Otherwise it might well be the case
that it would have been discussed on -devel.
BTW, that section say "should not" and not "must not"... you must allow
some flexibility in the interpretation of the sentence. You seem to be
very keen of interpreting it as a hard rule.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer
Follow my Debian News ▶ http://RaphaelHertzog.com (English)
▶ http://RaphaelHertzog.fr (Français)
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