Russ, Thanks very much for the thoughtful explanation. I'm glad that there will be a warning in the next release so that we realize it's a bad idea :)
Cheers, Jonathan On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 11:24 PM, Russ Allbery <r...@debian.org> wrote: > Jonathan Yu <jonathan.i...@gmail.com> writes: > >> This is a stupid idea, and I don't know any case where it might make >> sense to do it, but it has occurred to me that Policy doesn't mention >> anything explicitly forbidding it, as far as I can tell. > >> Lintian allows it through without warning about it. Presumably this is >> because nobody has ever done something like this before. > >> In the current Policy (a cursory glance at Chapter 7), it's unclear >> whether it is possible to do something like: > >> Depends: some-library [!all] > >> or: > >> Depends: some-library [all] > > Sorry about the (very long) delay in replying to this message. I had it > queued up to look at it further and then lost track of it. > > Policy currently says: > > The brackets enclose a list of Debian architecture names separated by > whitespace. Exclamation marks may be prepended to each of the names. > > all and any are not Debian architecture names. Those are defined in > 11.1. They're special values for the Architecture field. > >> I'm just not sure about the expected behaviour when the "special" >> keywords (all, any, source) are used. > > They should be rejected. Indeed, Lintian doesn't warn about this right > now except for source, nor does it warn about mixing exclamation points > and non-exclamation points in the same [] section. I'll fix that for the > next release. > > -- > Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> > -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-policy-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
