Gksu in 14.04?

[Tom H]

On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 10:26 AM, sktsee <sktseer at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 08 Aug 2014 06:06:18 -0400, Tom H wrote:
>> On Thu, Aug 7, 2014 at 12:07 PM, sktsee <sktseer at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Thu, 07 Aug 2014 05:59:50 -0400, Tom H wrote:


>>>> I wonder whether Ubuntu has a policy that packages in main can't
>>>> depend on packages in universe.
>>>
>>> http://people.canonical.com/~cjwatson/ubuntu-policy/policy.html/ch-
>>> archive.html
>>>
>>> "Every package in main must comply with the Ubuntu Licensing Policy.
>>>
>>> In addition, the packages in main
>>>
>>> must not require a package outside of main for compilation or execution
>>> (thus, the package must not declare a "Depends", "Recommends", or
>>> "Build-
>>> Depends" relationship on a non-main package),
>>>
>>> must not be so buggy that we refuse to support them, and
>>>
>>> must meet all policy requirements presented in this manual."
>>>
>>> Debian's policy includes "Pre-Depends" and "Build-Depends-Indep" as
>>> prohibited relationships.
>>
>> In the 12.04 output that you posted earlier, gksu was still in main.
>
> Right, because in 12.04 the packages update-manager and update-notifier
> which depend on gksu are in main, and according to the Ubuntu policy
> packages in main cannot have a "Depends:" or "Recommends:" dependency
> outside of main. This is why gksu had to be in main in 12.04. When no
> packages in main depended on gksu, it eventually moved to universe
> primarily because of the reasons you cited earlier: migration to polkit
> and no active development in 4 or 5 years now.

So the Ubuntu devs did a good job before releasing 14.04. :)


>>> Basically, packages in main can only have Suggests: dependencies on
>>> packages outside of main, though if I understood the recent discussion
>>> on the Debian technical committee list correctly, this could change in
>>> the near future wrt non-free packages.
>>
>> There'd be a revolution in Debian if this were to be allowed.

> The discussion centered on this bug:
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=681419
>
> This bug is actually two years old, but the Technical Committee is just
> now calling for a vote.
>
> Here's the recent vote thread on Gmane:
>
> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.debian.devel.bugs.general/1175557

Thanks. I now remember a more or less recent thread on debian-devel@
about an "unrar | rar" dependency.

It's not that non-free will be allowed in main but that packages in
main can have non-free, alternative dependencies (the first dependency
has to be in main).


>> (Are you referring to the discussion about the php license?!)
>
> No, I wasn't even aware of an issue with the php license. It could be
> related, but I think someone just filed a bug wanting clarification of
> the policy statement about main package dependencies.

There was a thread in May or June that started out by stating that the
php license is only suitable for software that comes directly from
upstream php itself.

I assume that this'll end up in the CTTE's lap.