Is there a wiki or something else that lays out exactly what other distributions and components each debian (distribution,component) tuple is allowed to depend on?
This is what I've concluded so far. I'm assuming transitive dependencies are allowed, e.g. bookworm-updates-contrib can depend on bookworm-non-free so I've considered the dependencies between distributions with the same component and the dependencies between components of the same distribution separately. First considering the distribution dependencies. All of these are always allowed between the same component. bookworm-proposed-updates : bookworm bookworm-updates : bookworm bookworm-backports-sloppy : bookworm-backports bookworm bookworm-backports : bookworm I believe that updates is a subset of proposed-updates so dependency on updates by proposed-updates is moot I'm unclear whether backports is allowed to depend on -updates but I assume not as I've not seen anything saying that you need to enable -updates if you enable -backports. I guess the backporter would have to wait for the point release if they ever needed something only in bookworm-updates (it's hard to imagine many cases where a -updates package would be required for backporting so this is somewhat theoretical - I think it's only if there's a security update involved) Now considering the dependencies between components in the same distribution: contrib : non-free non-free-firmware main non-free : non-free-firmware main non-free-firmware : main Some sources seem to say that non-free depends on contrib while others say contrib depends on non-free. My understanding on contrib is that it is for packages that cannot be in main because they depend on non-free even though they're otherwise free. But I'm not sure if there's a two way dependency here. I'm assuming that non-free-firmware cannot depend on non-free or contrib - that would seem to defeat the goal of non-free-firmware - although I could see a case where a firmware loader is in contrib while the firmware itself is in non-free so I'm not sure exactly what is allowed or expected here.