How important is "Architecture: any" (Was: Downloads things, ...)

[Andreas Tille <tillea@rki.de>]

On Thu, 28 Feb 2008, Andreas Tille wrote:

> Anyway, I'm thinking about the following approach:
>
>  1. Add a "dist" target to the Makefile of the source package.
>  2. Build the tarball from SVN by doing make dist.
>     Perhaps a time stamp in dist.stamp or something makes
>     sense.
>  3. In this proces debian/control (which should be _not_ checked
>     in into SVN, because it is auto generated) should be builded.
>     It should _not_ be touched later on.
>  4. Perhaps we add a line:
>       XS-Warning: Do not touch this control file manually.  It is
>                   auto generated blabla
>     (Please correct me if I'm wrong, but XS-* tags should be
>     ignred and thus we could use it as comment, right?
>
> This should solve on the one hand the problem of generating an
> up to date debian/control (in case we let not rot the source tarball
> very long anywhere) while beeing able to get rid of this
> network at bauild time / download stuff which belongs to source
> etc stuff.

I've though (slept ;-) ) about this and it should work fine.  There
is only one real problem: If we would really stick to "Architecture: any"
packages we would have to compile <number of arch> times the control
files and move the neede control file to the right place once the
package is finally builded.

I would regard this as pure overkill for very less use.  IMHO it
would be fine to build the control file on the most feature rich
architceture which is probably i386 and live mit not fullfilled
Recommends on some not so good supported archs.

Am I missing something?

Kind regards

            Andreas.

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