Dependency for roman numeral support and Ubuntu

[pushkarnk]

Background

On Ubuntu the sphinx package is a part of the main component of the archive. By policy, packages in main are officially supported by Canonical. Also by policy, for any package in main its runtime dependencies must also be in main. New open-source packages are initially added to the universe component and promoted to main by the Ubuntu Main Inclusion Review (MIR) process, only if justified. The MIR process ensures that the main component does not have redundant packages that provide similar functionality.

For roman numeral support, Sphinx moved to using the roman-numerals project after the roman package was removed from docutils.utils. Consequently, a new roman-numerals package has been introduced in Debian and Ubuntu.

Problem

The new roman-numerals package is currently in the universe component in Ubuntu. By policy, it needs to be promoted to the main component (because sphinx is in main). However, main already has a very similar roman package for the roman project under PyPi. This makes it difficult to justify the promotion of roman-numerals to main!

It is very much likely that roman-numerals was consciously chosen over roman. Would it be possible to move to using the latter in place of the former?

As an interim solution, I have proposed a patch to the sphinx package in Ubuntu. But Ubuntu prefers to maintain such patches only if there is no other resort.

Thank you for reading through!

[AA-Turner]

Thanks, but using roman-numerals is an intentional choice. We have no control over downstream redistributors, but also if they do something unusual we provide no support for it and strongly discourage patching like this.

A