Hi, On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 03:20:28PM +0100, Julian Andres Klode wrote: > I would like to suggest two major improvements related to packages > which are "Architecture: all". > > The first thing I want to suggest is the handling of dependencies. > When building a package, you can use "Depends: package [arch1 arch2]" > which means that it depends on package only on the architectures arch1 > and arch2. But this only works for architecture dependent packages. > Therefore, I would like to not process this "command" during the > build-time, but do it at the installation time. > > This is especially useful for recommends, since all recommends have to > be available. Without it, the best way is to only suggest the package. I don't see the "major improvement". Why would you want to use this? I see two reasons: - There is a real Recommends: relation, but the target package is not available on some architectures. In this case, excluding them from the recommends list would hide the bug instead of fixing it. - In rare cases, I can imagine that some really low-level tool is not available, especially on different kernels (kfreebsd or hurd, for example). While this is a legitimate reason, I think it's so rare that it certainly doesn't count as "major improvement". > The other suggestion [2] is to add a field called > "Install-Architecture" to the control file, listing architectures for > which this package should be available. Another idea is to use > "Architecture: all [i386 amd64 ppc]", which seems to be better [3]. This sounds useful, indeed. If you have the coding skills, I think patches would be appreciated. ;-) Thanks, Bas -- I encourage people to send encrypted e-mail (see http://www.gnupg.org). If you have problems reading my e-mail, use a better reader. Please send the central message of e-mails as plain text in the message body, not as HTML and definitely not as MS Word. Please do not use the MS Word format for attachments either. For more information, see http://pcbcn10.phys.rug.nl/e-mail.html
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