Samuel Thibault <sthibault@debian.org> writes:
> I didn't find a previous discussion on this: it would be useful to
> support negated architecture specifications in the debian/control
> Architecture field, so that we can e.g. write:
> Architecture: !s390 !s390x
> (for xorg stuff)
> Architecture: !hppa !hurd-any !kfreebsd-any
> (for java stuff)
> and even things like
> Architecture: linux-any kfreebsd-any !hppa !m68k-any
> which would be understood as [ (linux-any or kfreebsd-any) and not hppa
> and not m68k-any ]. I.e. if no positive specification is set, an "any"
> positive specification is assumed.
> That would help to remove quite a few entries of
> https://buildd.debian.org/quinn-diff/experimental/Packages-arch-specific
> and avoid packages with some java bits to have to hardcode the list of
> ports on which java jni bindings packages should be built.
> I guess support would be needed in dpkg, lintian, etc.
Hi Samuel,
I agree that this would be useful. This has come up frequently over the
years, and back when I was maintaining architecture-specific packages, the
lack of this feature was often annoying.
But (as may be obvious from the long delay in even getting a response),
Policy can't drive the implementation of this change and therefore
probably isn't a good place to start with the request. I think it would
need to start with dpkg and ftp-master (for DAK). I'm therefore probably
going to have to close this bug against Policy as unactionable since I
don't know of any efforts towards implementing this support, and Policy
would only be able to change once the support is available.
If I misunderstood the current state, please do let me know.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>