Dependencies between components.

[Tim Woodall <debianuser@woodall.me.uk>]

Is there a wiki or something else that lays out exactly what other
distributions and components each debian (distribution,component) tuple
is allowed to depend on?

This is what I've concluded so far.

I'm assuming transitive dependencies are allowed, e.g.
bookworm-updates-contrib can depend on bookworm-non-free so I've
considered the dependencies between distributions with the same
component and the dependencies between components of the same
distribution separately.


First considering the distribution dependencies. All of these are
always allowed between the same component.

bookworm-proposed-updates : bookworm
bookworm-updates          : bookworm
bookworm-backports-sloppy : bookworm-backports bookworm
bookworm-backports        : bookworm

I believe that updates is a subset of proposed-updates so dependency
on updates by proposed-updates is moot

I'm unclear whether backports is allowed to depend on -updates but I
assume not as I've not seen anything saying that you need to enable
-updates if you enable -backports. I guess the backporter would have to
wait for the point release if they ever needed something only in
bookworm-updates (it's hard to imagine many cases where a -updates
package would be required for backporting so this is somewhat
theoretical - I think it's only if there's a security update involved)


Now considering the dependencies between components in the same
distribution:

contrib                      : non-free non-free-firmware main
non-free                     : non-free-firmware main
non-free-firmware            : main

Some sources seem to say that non-free depends on contrib while others
say contrib depends on non-free. My understanding on contrib is that it
is for packages that cannot be in main because they depend on non-free
even though they're otherwise free. But I'm not sure if there's a two
way dependency here.

I'm assuming that non-free-firmware cannot depend on non-free or contrib
- that would seem to defeat the goal of non-free-firmware - although I
could see a case where a firmware loader is in contrib while the
firmware itself is in non-free so I'm not sure exactly what is allowed
or expected here.