Re: Upcoming Debian multiarch support (amd64, sparc64, s390x, mips64) [affects sarge slightly]

[Eduard Bloch <edi@gmx.de>]

Moin Goswin!
Goswin von Brederlow schrieb am Sunday, den 11. January 2004:

> Affected packages:
> (Entries marked with * are targeted for the sarge release, + already
> have working experimental code)
> 
> dpkg: + support for multiple packages with the same name
>       + support for multiple architectures and abis
>       * keeping track of the architecture of each installed deb
>       + autorename some package files or directories that otherwise
>         collide (copyright, changelog, pre/postinst/rm of lib packages)
>       - package:arch syntax
> 
> apt: - package:arch syntax
>      +/- support for multiple binary-<arch> dirs
>      + support for multiple architectures and abis
>      - support for multiple packages with the same name
>      - strict abi matching for libs, downloading the right abi

So someone is going to touch core components of essential programs, and IMHO
it is a good time to implement a long needed feature: conditional
dependencies. Last time I asked the answers were like: "too
complicated", "requires major changes in apt for no good reason", "use
workarounds" (while workarounds result in cludges like the
"type-handling" package or ugly permutations of Arch-Tags in
Build-Dependencies).

The major logic behind arch-compatibility decissions and
dependencies with addional checks is a bit similar.

MfG,
Eduard.
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