On Thu, Jun 08, 2000 at 05:34:56PM -0400, Branden Robinson wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 08, 2000 at 10:53:26AM -0700, Craig Brozefsky wrote:
> > This would mean a considerable number of broken packages on the Debian
> > archives, where we presently have none (in a theoretical sense).
> But this just isn't true. For instance, take these freely-licensed old
> hardware emulators that require ROM images from ancient computers/game
> consoles.
Take also the various installer packages about.
> I think we should continue to package DFSG-free software, even with
> dependencies that can't be met, declared or undeclared. The package
> description, of course, should tell the user how to obtain the materials
> depended on.
Policy says:
] Every package has to specify the dependency information about other
] packages, that are required for the first to work correctly.
which, at the moment, we treat as a requirement to have a Depends:
line for everything that's packaged or packageable, and a requirement
to actually distribute the packages to satisfy those dependencies.
Having Lyx not have an explicit dependency on xforms (apt-get install lyx
succeeds, but it doesn't work, why not?), or having that dependency not be
meetable within Debian (should it depend on libxforms? or xformslib? or
something else? who knows whether a hypothetical external non-free
repository might decide to call it?) will result in annoying problems.
The difference between this situation and undistributable ROMs and
binaries is that there we *can't* do anything about it, whereas here
we're simply saying we *won't*.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG encrypted mail preferred.
``We reject: kings, presidents, and voting.
We believe in: rough consensus and working code.''
-- Dave Clark
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