On Fri, 13 Jul 2012, Russ Allbery wrote: > Don Armstrong <[email protected]> writes: > > For example, if foo conflicted with baz, but foo-nonfree did not > > and baz was installed, foo-nonfree could be installed in > > preference to foo without the user specifically asking for > > foo-nonfree. > > It seems like it would be difficult for the person adding the > alternative dependency to know whether this is the case, and it > could change later without any changes to the package that has the > dependency.
I believe they could know at the point they added the dependency, but it could certainly change at some point later in time. That'd just result in a bug when it was found. > More broadly, if it's there as an alternative dependency, then I > think it's hard to know whether the dependency evaluation scheme > might choose to pull it in for other, less obvious reasons. For > example, the non-free version might have fewer dependencies, or the > free version may have dependencies that have transient > installability issues. I don't see how to guarantee the behavior > that you want. True. > I had previously assumed that we weren't worrying too much about > issues like that because the end-user had to have explicitly enabled > the non-free repository to have any of the non-free packages become > candidates, and that (having enabled that repository) they were > requesting the best possible dependency resolution including the > non-free repository. This disadvantage is that normally you have to install specific packages in non-free because nothing in main will pull them in. I'm primarily worried about someone accidentally pulling in a non-free package which has some kind of restrictive usage license. A possible compromise would be to only allow this kind of alternative dependency on non-free packages which do not have usage restrictions. Don Armstrong -- I'd sign up in a hot second for any cellular company whose motto was: "We're less horrible than a root canal with a cold chisel." -- Cory Doctorow http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
