/usr/share and -common pkgs

[Justin Pryzby <justinpryzby@users.sourceforge.net>]

-common packages are used to reduce the size of the archive; arch
independant data need not be included in each of the 10+ arch-specific
binary packages; only one package is needed.

As expected, most of the contents of the -common packages are in
/usr/share:

  time zgrep -Ff <(apt-cache search -n -- -common |sed -ne 's/[^a-z0-9.+-].*//; s/^/\//; /-common/p') /home/pryzbyj/conflict/Contents-i386.gz |grep -Eo '^(usr/)?[^/]*' |uniq -c |sort -nr
  46366 usr/share
   3319 usr/lib
    586 etc
    298 var
    165 usr/bin
    133 usr/include
     83 usr/sbin
      6 sbin
      3 usr/games
      3 usr/X11R6

The LFS intent of separating /usr/share and /usr/lib is to allow a
filesever to export /usr/share to machines of *any* architecture
running the same OS (/usr is supposed to be sharable to machines of
the *same* arch).  But this is considerably complicated by the fact
that many packages *depend* on their -common data (90), or the other
way around (20); some both (12) [out of 271]:

  apt-cache search -n -- -common |sed -ne 's/[^a-z0-9.+-].*//; h;G; s/\n/ /; s/-common//p;' |while read p q; do r=`apt-cache show $q 2>/dev/null || continue`; grep -q "^Depends:.* $p[ (,]" <<<"$r" || continue; echo $p; done

Twiddle the p's and q's and second || to && to taste.

Years ago I asked Zed Pobre about this, and he said that the arch and
indep packages should recommend each other; in the typical case, they
should both be installed; in the fileserver case, only arch is
installed on the clients; only indep on the server.

Is this recommendation widely accepted, or just for cases where
likeliness of using a fileserver is relatively high?  Should policy
make a recommendation^W^W^W^Wbugs be filed?  If not, what is the
suggested way to run such a fileserver setup for these packages?
equivs?

Please Cc: me.
Justin