hi all, recently on IRC, i asked why "to exclude specific archs in Recommends/Suggests?".
the use case is, that some package "foo" might not be available for a specific arch (e.g. FTBFS on hurd-any), and package "bar" would still like to recommend it (since "bar" is used together with "foo" 'in all but unusual installations' - and hurd-any is considered an 'unusual' though possible environment, 'unusual' mainly because "bar" is not available, and also because it's hurd...). my intuition tells me to use "Recommends: foo", and everyone can use "bar" and will be happy (though the hurd-people less so, because they don't get the extra features that 'foo' provides until somebody fixes that FTBFS). however, one of the first answers i got was: "recommending a non-existent package is forbidden". now §2.2.1 of our policy indeed says that 'packages in main must not require or recommend a package outside of main for compilation or execution (thus, the package must not declare a "Pre-Depends", "Depends", "Recommends" [...] relationship on a non-main package)'. my first reaction was that the intention of this paragraph is mainly to keep the system uncontaminated from non-free and contrib, but while the §2.2.1 refers a lot to DFSG, the quote above is explicitely "in addition" to the DFSG, so it *might* apply. so my question is: Does §2.2.1 indeed apply to Recommends for packages that are in the main archive but not available for a given architecture? If so, what is the reasoning? Also: does the "main archive" contain multiple architectures, or do we have a main archive per architecture? (if the former, then i think that §2.2.1 does not apply). mgfsadr IOhannes
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