Hi Colin, everyone, On Thursday 25 October 2012 09:05:30 Colin Watson wrote: > Here's a draft of a ballot for #681419. Despite the form, I think this > is probably still more of a discussion document; Ian indicated that he'd > like the opportunity to discuss this by e-mail before voting, and I > don't know if I've fully captured all the positions and arguments. [...] > Whereas: > > 1. The Debian Policy Manual states (ยง2.2.1) that packages in main > "must not require or recommend a package outside of main for > compilation or execution". Both "Depends: package-in-non-free" and > "Recommends: package-in-non-free" clearly violate this requirement. > The Technical Committee has been asked to determine whether a > dependency of the form "package-in-main | package-in-non-free" > complies with this policy requirement, or whether virtual packages > must instead be used to avoid mentioning the non-free alternative.
I think I must note something that I find rather important, before it is too late: the current tech-ctte discussion revolves only around non-free. My proposed wording on the policy bug, and later Russ' wording that I seconded, both talk about packages *not in main*. To spell it out: the original discussion in the policy bug report also covered packages in contrib while the current discussion doesn't. Oh, and while I personally disagree with the use of virtual packages in the way proposed by option B of the ballot, I think it should make it clear that the virtual package name must not be the name of a real package. That is, I ask the comittee to explicitely disallow cases such as the example of package "foo" in http://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?msg=17;bug=587279 Cheers, -- Raphael Geissert - Debian Developer www.debian.org - get.debian.net -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org