[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> Right, the package in main should not depend on an hypothetical package >> from non-free. >So rather than ship the driver in contrib and the firmware in >non-free, you're suggesting that the driver go in main and the >firmware not be shipped at all, even though that reduces the >functionality of the driver to "Error: no firmware found." Yes. I believe that this better serves our users. I can think about at least two common situations in which an hard dependency would not be appropriate or even possible: - when distribution is restricted by copyright, so we cannot distribute it even in non-free (usually when the driver has been developed from scratch by a third party) - when the firmware is used by a device needed to install the system, like a network card or a modem (if the user has got the Debian system on a CD it may be easier for him to get the firmware from the vendor CD than downloading it and the transfering it to the target system using some removable media)
>That seems as clear a dependence as any other foo and foo-data package >in the repository. Probably because you did not think much about real-life issues... -- ciao, Marco
