architecture alias and disto rebuild

[Bill Allombert <allomber@math.u-bordeaux.fr>]

Hello Debian developers,

Some distributions/people rebuild a lot of Debian packages from Debian
source while making no change to the source. While this is technically
a binNMU they seldom bother to bump the version, which lead to two debs
files with different content (if they are built with a different version
of gcc, e.g) which somehow break the package version idea and make very
hard to see it is not the one compiled by Debian.

This is understandable since bumping the version can cause unforeseen
bugs  (though I would like very much a list of package that cannot be
binNMUed). So I propose a alternate solution:

If the distro foobar rebuild packages on i386, they could use
i386foobar as architecture name instead of i386, this way every
package they rebuild will be clearly marked as such. 

Of course, if foobar want to allow regular Debian package to be installed,
they can just patch dpkg so that it accept both kind of package.

The morale of the story is: since we have now comprehensive plateform
handling with CPU-SYSTEM, why not go a little farther and add a BUILDER
field with the suitable logic in dpkg so that it allow to install
packages from any builder by default ?

Cheers,
-- 
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>

Imagine a large red swirl here.