Bug#340704: rar support violates DFSG #4

[Robert Millan <rmh@aybabtu.com>]

On Fri, Nov 25, 2005 at 02:41:49AM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote:
> 
> Sorry, I have to disagree with these bug severities; Suggests: are just not
> important enough in our packaging system to treat them as release-critical,
> regardless of what's being suggested,

Hi Steve,

My concern is about the rar writing support itself, not about Suggests.  The
Suggests tag is just an indication that either the application supports
generating rar archives (or that there's a mistake, and the maintainer just
mean to suggest "unrar" instead).

> and it is generally considered
> acceptable to Suggest: non-free packages from main anyway.

Well, that's not the problem.  If the application needs unrar to extract rar
archives, then suggesting unrar is ok [1].  It's the fact that the application
supports creating rar archives that I believe violates the DFSG.

Does this explanation satisfy you?  If it does, I'd like to rise the severity
back to serious (I don't think it's an issue for the release, being only 4
bugs).

OTOH, if you think my interpretation of DFSG is inadequate, I could try to
expose it better, and we could also move this to -legal (perhaps I should have
started there in first place).

Thanks!

[1] In fact, unrar is one of the two non-free packages whose distribution by
  Debian I would personaly endorse.

-- 
Robert Millan