Getting rid of type-handling from the archive

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

Hi!

I've been filing bug reports on packages Build-Depending on
type-handling to switch to native arch wildcards, the bugs still open
are:

  #639117 [w|+|  ] e2tools: Remove unused type-handling from Build-Depends
  #639332 [w|+|  ] buildcross: Remove deprecated Depends on type-handling
  #639164 [w|+P| ] gdb: Stop using deprecated type-handling Build-Depends

The remaining issue is the virtual architectures Provided by
type-handling itself used in dependency fields, which are known to
cause problems on buildds.

Before even considering its removal I think we should know how many
packages make use of those virtual architecture dependencies, and file
bugs accordingly (maybe after a mass-bug discussion on devian-devel).
Those would need to be checked against every architecture Packages file
for anything matching «dpkg-architecture -L» output, and the split
cpu/system variants.

Thorsten Glaser proposed to try to make this a release goal, but even
if we've had in mind getting rid of type-handling for a long time, I
don't think I could take active responsibility of such release goal at
the moment.

Anyone volunteers?

thanks,
guillem