Re: [PROPOSED] Change package relations policy to remove references to non-free from main

[Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org>]

Hi,
>>"Chris" == Chris Waters <xtifr@dsp.net> writes:

 Chris> Wichert Akkerman <wichert@cistron.nl> writes:
 >> Previously Chris Waters wrote:
 >> > The problem with the "Enhances" idea (which several people, including
 >> > me, mentioned at the time) is that it puts the responsibility on the
 >> > wrong package.

 >> Yes and no. It's actually a nice addition to the current sent of
 >> relations since we had no way for this kind of reverse relation.

 Chris> Hmm, ok.  I'm not convinced that there'll ever be any real[*] need to
 Chris> do so, but I agree that adding the capability does no harm.

 Chris> [*] that is to say, technical, rather than political.

        Oh, but there is. In the social, administrative, or domain of
 control arena, it is nice to have enhances. The relationships that
 suggests and enhances embody are weak, and often non-directional, snd
 the decisive factor may reside in which maintainer notices the
 relationship first.

        See, I package VM. It has QP and base64 codecs in elisp, which
 tends to make the process very slow. The VM author has written fast C
 programs, not as a part of VM, but on the same ftp site, so that VM
 may call a fast external process for decoding. Now, some one may
 package it up, and just say they enhance VM (they are stand alone
 encoders/decoders, so they do not depend on VM, and VM does not
 depend on them). This way, they do not have to wait on me to upload a
 modified VM.

        And then Gnus, which needs fast codecs too, can see the
 external programs, and say Neat!, and write code to use them. And now
 Gnus may suggest the external codec.

        I also see a package suggest another, which says it enhances
 the first. No harm in that.
        
        manoj
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Manoj Srivastava   <srivasta@debian.org>  <http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/>
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