Re: [GSoC] blends-gen-control hints (Was: blends-dev, gsoc 2013)

[Emmanouil Kiagias <e.kiagias@gmail.com>]

Hello Andreas,

I was offline on Friday(I included that on my report) and the past 3 days. I was invited to go to Thessaloniki by a friend to attend at openSUSE conf[0] and thus I was offline the past 4 days, mostly because of travelling(sorry I should have mentioned this earlier but it was a last minute decision). I will have covered up the working hours by the end of the week. 

I read again Debian Policy Manual in order to check for the control file alternative syntax. From here[1] it seems that the syntax you mentioned is also valid for the Depends field.  So we can have Depends header like:

Depends: foo [i386], bar [amd64]

or

Depends: foo [!i386], bar [!amd64] etc.

So my first idea is to add "Architecture: any" in our packages, for example:

Package: med-bio

Architecture: any

Priority: extra

Depends: foo [!i386], bar (etc..)

So in this case any "Depends" package which is not in Debian distribution and the main component will be moved to "Suggests"(as we are doing now) and the rest of the packages(debian,main) will stay in Depends but they will exclude the architectures in which they are not available. For example if the package "foo" is available in all architectures except kfreebsd-amd64 and kfreebsd-i386 it will be like:

Depends: foo [!kfreebsd-amd64 !kfreebsd-i386 ] ...

In this case I have a question. If the -D argument is passed into the blend-gen-control then the Depends are fixed like:

Depends: med-tasks (= ${binary:Version}) 

and the "Depends" are added into the "Recommends". So in case of -D the control file should be like the following: ?(does it make sense to exclude an architecture from the Recommends header?)

 Depends: med-tasks (= ${binary:Version}) 

 Recommends: foo [!kfreebsd-amd64 !kfreebsd-i386 ] 

Kind regards

Emmanouil

[0]: https://conference.opensuse.org/

[1]: http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html