Bug#587279: Clarify restrictions on main to non-free dependencies
Raphael Geissert <geissert@debian.org> writes:
> After five years of letting the discussion settle down, perhaps there's
> a way to move things forward now?
> Other than the discussion about foo2zjs I think that only Bill believes
> that the new wording proposed in message #56 differs from the current
> practice.
> Moreover, as demonstrated by follow ups, the issue raised by Bill
> regarding the possibility of an accidental installation of non-free
> software appears to be a system configuration problem. That is, the
> granularity of what should or should not be taken into consideration
> when resolving a package's dependencies can and should be handled on the
> package manager's side.
> As such, I believe that the proposed wording is appropriate and open for
> seconding.
Here is an updated version of the patch from earlier in this (now very
long) thread for discussion. I still think this is consistent with
previous practice and reasonable documentation of what we're currently
doing.
diff --git a/policy.xml b/policy.xml
index 7ba5fc0..daf4c3c 100644
--- a/policy.xml
+++ b/policy.xml
@@ -595,7 +595,9 @@
<literal>Build-Depends</literal>,
<literal>Build-Depends-Indep</literal>, or
<literal>Build-Depends-Arch</literal> relationship on a
- non-<emphasis>main</emphasis> package),
+ non-<emphasis>main</emphasis> package) unless that package
+ is only listed as a non-default alternative for a package in
+ <emphasis>main</emphasis>,
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
If we still can't reach consensus on this, we should probably bump it to
the Technical Committee for resolution so that this doesn't just sit
around unresolved forever. (I feel like that happened at some point in
the past, but it's been so long that my memory is very hazy.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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