On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 07:41:11PM +0200, Luk Claes wrote: > On 09/20/2011 01:12 PM, Gerfried Fuchs wrote: > > 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: > > That being said, it might be that having a predictable set of build > dependencies on the buildds is not wanted anymore?
I'm fairly certain that we do want predictability and consistency. > > 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? > > Personally I think we should stay with a predictable set of build > dependencies on the buildds (only have them look at the first > alternative) and we should stay with having a package in main as the > first alternative of a build dependency of a package in main. Just to comment on the build dependencies: first-only alternatives are only implemented for Build-Depends and Build-Depends-Indep (for all resolvers). They get stripped when computing the set of packages to install. Alternatives in regular package Depends are delegated to apt-get/aptitude, and what is installed will depend upon what is available and installable. For packages being build for main, the contrib and non-free archives should not be available, so such alternatives should not be considered. Regards, Roger -- .''`. Roger Leigh : :' : Debian GNU/Linux http://people.debian.org/~rleigh/ `. `' Printing on GNU/Linux? http://gutenprint.sourceforge.net/ `- GPG Public Key: 0x25BFB848 Please GPG sign your mail. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110920181701.gq3...@codelibre.net