perl and multi-arch (was: Re: Upcoming Debian multiarch support (amd64, sparc64, s390x, mips64) [affects sarge slightly])

[Anthony DeRobertis <asd@suespammers.org>]

I'm not quite clear on this point. Let's say there is an 
architecture-dependent perl library (=modules):

	lib-a-perl

First off, what bit-ness do we build this for? 32- or 64-bit? I assume 
both. So we have two packages:

	lib-a-perl:amd64
	lib-a-perl:i386

Now, I package a perl script, foo, which uses a.pm. It is 
architecture-independent, so what does it dependency look like? Not 
lib-a-perl:amd64 or lib-a-perl:i386. It's the same package on every 
architecture, after all.

At first glance, it'd copy the architecture, leaving the rather silly 
Depends: lib-a-perl:all. I guess that'd need to be treated specially.

But that leaves the problem that while foo certainly doesn't care which 
lib-a-perl it gets, perl certainly does. Well, lib-a-perl:amd64 is 
going to depend on perlapi-X and perl:amd64, so I guess that works out 
technically.

Does apt deal with that mess nicely? That's a huge dependency tree.