Re: versioned dependency on base-files

On Fri, May 29, 2026 at 03:57:56PM +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> I noteice that base-files 14.1 covers more license texts. Great!
> Thanks to Mechtilde, Santiago and others involved!
> 
> I guess that when taking advantage of that by shrinking
> debian/copyright files to only reference some of those texts,
> that we should then declare a versioned dependency on
> base-files >= 14.1, right?

While we can and probably should remove license text in favor of the
licenses included in base-files, I would say that introducing such
versioned dependency (or tracking it the future to eventually remove) is
not useful use of developer time. There is no functional dependency
between the packages, it's only "look over there for the full text",
inside free-form text. No upgrade will ever require that dependency to
work properly.

As long as the upload that makes this reference comes after base-files
actually contains the license, I would advocate us to *not* recommend
such versioned dependency, or even to advise against it.

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