On 2017-03-07 at 11:40, Ian Jackson wrote:
> Adam Borowski writes ("Re: Non-free RFCs in stretch"):
>
>> On Tue, Mar 07, 2017 at 02:48:59PM +0000, Ian Jackson wrote:
>>
>>> I have a suggestion for how this could be done.
>>>
>>> We give each reason-why-a-package-might-be-nonfree-or-contrib a
>>> name in the package namespace. I'm going to call these packages
>>> antimetapackages.
>>>
>>> Each package in non-free or contrib must Recommend all the
>>> antimetapackages which apply.
>>
>> Why Recommend rather than Depend? The latter would allow a hard
>> conflict with everything with a specific kind of badness, which
>> seems exactly like the thing people here are looking for.
>
> Did you see where I wrote:
>
> We use Recommends because these are all policy decisions which the
> user may wish to override on an individual basis.
>
> The point being that it is for Debian to advise and inform users,
> but ultimately the user should have the freedom to make their own
> compromises. So we should assist the user to implement their
> personal policy. But we mustn't _insist_ on the user following their
> own policy as expressed, probably inaccurately, in our dependency
> system.
>
> In practical terms, apt makes it very hard to maintain a system
> where a Depends is violated. Conversely it provides a good sticky
> door (in the default configuration, at least) to avoid unintentional
> violation of Recommends, but once a Recommends is violated it doesn't
> cause further problems.Can you provide an example of how, under your proposal, someone who wants to - e.g. - forbid the installation of any nonfree-gfdl-invariant packages would do so? I don't see any way to accomplish that based on Recommends:, precisely because Recommends: can be overridden. For "Depends: foo", I'd probably try to do it by pinning foo to priority -1, or something along those lines - but such a pin would do nothing to prevent packages which only Recommend foo. I could see a possible way of doing this with Conflicts: or similar, such that you just install the packages which the ones you want to prohibit will conflict with - but trying to set up a suitable collection of antimetapackages to be conflicted against seems like a recipe for madness. I hope I'm just missing something, because this looks like a very interesting idea. With Recommends:, however, it looks like it would do nothing more than potentially warn the user at install time that a package which is about to be installed violates this particular freedom condition - and that doesn't seem like enough of a benefit to be worth the investment. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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