Re: FTBFS of netcfg on s390 after debhelper v7 conversion

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 03:21:36PM +0100, Frans Pop wrote:
> I've just tried building netcfg on s390, but that fails with:
>     dpkg-gencontrol: error: current host architecture 's390' does not
>     appear in package's architecture list (i386 sparc alpha m68k arm
>     armel armeb powerpc mips mipsel hppa ia64 amd64 lpia kfreebsd-i386
>     kfreebsd-amd64)
>     dh_gencontrol: dpkg-gencontrol returned exit code 255

Thanks for catching this.

> AFAICT the reason is that the binary netcfg is !s390 (while netcfg-static 
> is arch any).
> 
> Before the conversion to debhelper v7, we called most dh_command with 
> the '-s' option. If I add an overrides in d/rules for dh_gencontrol *and* 
> dh_builddeb to pass the -s option, netcfg builds correctly again.
> 
> I wonder why this is needed? Shouldn't this "just work"?

I'm surprised that this wouldn't work with debhelper 7.4.0 or newer,
actually, as -s is no longer supposed to be necessary:

debhelper (7.4.0) unstable; urgency=low

  * Optimise -s handling to avoid running dpkg-architecture if a package
    is arch all. This was, suprisingly, the only overhead of using the -s
    flag with arch all/any packages.
  * The -a flag now does the same thing as the -s flag, so debhelper users
    do not need to worry about using the -s flag when building a package
    that only builds for some architectures, and dh will also work in that
    situation. Closes: #540794

 -- Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>  Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:41:16 -0400

As such, I'm not sure that netcfg is the proper place to fix this,
since, as you say, it should "just work". What version of debhelper were
you building with?

> I also wonder if other converted packages could have the same issue.

I wouldn't expect many; I test-built everything I converted so it will
at least be fine on i386, and there aren't that many packages that do
tricky architecture-specific things so they should be caught in the
normal course of events.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@debian.org]