Dear Gerfried, Gerfried Fuchs schrieb am 20.09.2011 13:12: > Policy is clear on packages in main aren't allowed to depend on > packages outside of main. Now in a fair amount of cases this has been > worked around by having the package outside of main as alternative > dependency and a package in main offer basic functionality for the > package to still be able to work. > > I know that the buildd system likes to pull in the first package in > such an alternative dependency chain. And now I start to wonder: > > Is it allowed for a package in main to have a package _outside_ of main > as first component of an alternative dependency? The package in > question is extremely unlikely to ever be used as Build-Depends, so this > is of a more general question.
I'd say – from a technical viewpoint – it should be ok, because the buildds (for main) just shouldn't offer the possibility to install something from outside of main. Though I must admit, that I've no idea, whether this is enforced by the buildds or not (I would hope so, because, otherwise we might end up with Policy-broken builds anyway, in case the main B-D isn't satisfiable at build time, while the non-main is). > What also might be used as argument is the social contract, DFSG #4: > "Our priorities are our users and free software" -- it can be argued > that we don't put the priority on free software in such a case. > > tl;dr - what do you think, is a "Depends: foo-contrib | foo" acceptable > for packages in main or should it be "Depends: foo | foo-contrib" > instead? Ideologically I'd vote for the latter, just to make sure people can rely on getting the free/open/libre installation on default, even if they might need contrib or non-free in some places. If you want/need (maybe add a README.Debian, explaining the differences) the contrib/non-free functionality, you can manually install that. Kind regards, Kai Wasserbäch -- E-Mail: cu...@debian.org IRC: Curan Jabber: dri...@debianforum.de URL: http://wiki.debian.org/C%C3%B9ran GnuPG: 0xE1DE59D2 0600 96CE F3C8 E733 E5B6 1587 A309 D76C E1DE 59D2
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