Bug#824495: debian-policy: Source packages "can" declare relationships

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Sean Whitton writes ("Bug#824495: debian-policy: Source packages "can" declare relationships"):
> On Sun 11 Nov 2018 at 11:31AM GMT, Simon McVittie wrote:
> > I think the best practice is for maintainers to notice new features being
> > added, make a deliberate decision on what to enable (in an architecture-
> > or kernel-specific way if appropriate), and use the equivalent of
> > --disable-apparmor for any feature we don't (yet?) want to enable.
> 
> Right.  ISTM that it would be a bug if this was not done, which is why
> it seems unwise to include Ian's (ii) in Policy.

I think it could easily be more convenient for derivatives to take the
alternative route.  If I were the Debian maintainer and also the
maintainer in a derivative, I might prefer to keep the source package
delta as small as possible.

Depending on the circumstances the source package delta for that
package might vanish entirely and the divergence dealt with entirely
through changes to the build dependencies, or build environment (eg
apt pinning), which mean that the Build-Depends has a different
result.

Currently everyone agrees with me that the behaviour permitted by my
(ii) is probably common.  So we cannot forbid it with a MUST.

Ian.

-- 
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