Hi, currently our policy says that main packages must only (build-)depend on main packages, but contrib and non-free packages could use packages from contrib and non-free.
In practice build-dependencies from non-free are not used by the buildds for two reasons: 1. (mostly historical) we need to make sure that the packages are not installed anymore while building packages from main - this can be ensured via the lvm-snapshot type chroots however 2. we don't know (on an automated basis) which packages in non-free can be used as build-dependency without violating copyright. For the source packages we use the marker "Autobuild: yes", but that won't do for binary packages where we only want to have some packages considered by apt/aptitude. Some obvious solutions come to my mind: 1. Split non-free into "non-free-but-useable", i.e. packages that can be autobuilt, and can be used as a build-dependency (and where main + contrib + non-free is self-contained, like main today already is), and "silly-non-free" (the remaining packages). 2. Make a sub-disttree from non-free of the acceptable packages, and put it somewhere only on ftp-master or a few hosts only (that's enough for installing build-dependencies on buildds already) Other ideas? Opinions? Andi -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100402175855.ge19...@mails.so.argh.org