Bug #119517 concerns the bundled little utility called cardinfo. I quote the maintainer:
'Since cardinfo does not contribute a "significant amount of functionality" to the package, this is not the appropriate level of dependency for the packages required to make cardinfo work.' Ironically, this same utility was involved in a very similar situation in December 1998 when it was linked against non-free XForms, and the package had only a Suggests dependency on non-free/libforms. Some of us objected to a dependency on a non-free library for a package in main. Brian argued exactly the same point at the time, that the utility played only a small part in the package. See the debian-devel archives for December 1998 for a thread with subject line: Bug#30739: When a tiny part of a package uses non-free libraries To the technical committee, if you rule that a package's minor binary's libraries need not be declared as a Depends (I hope not), then please address the same question with the added twist that the minor binary may need a dependency to non-free (which is usually not allowed for a package in main). I think this case should definately be forbidden as it's a slippery slope. One would then only need to package non-free stuff together with larger related free software in order to get into main something that would not be allowed by itself. Thanks, -- Peter Galbraith
