Re: How to tell users that ia32-libs will go away
On Thu, Feb 09, 2012 at 10:52:55AM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 09, 2012 at 04:43:04PM +0100, Thibaut Paumard wrote:
> > Le 09/02/12 15:53, Goswin von Brederlow a écrit :
>
> > > now that a multiarch dpkg has been uploaded to experimental it looks
> > > like we can finaly get rid of ia32-libs* for wheezy.
>
> > > !!!HURAY!!!
>
> > > The problem now is the transition:
>
> > > 1) multiarch and ia32-libs are incompatible
> > >[...]
> > > What this means is that users that want to use multiarch should remove
> > > ia32-libs (and lib32* really) soonest.
>
> > Couldn't you make ia32-libs a meta-package pulling the multiarch version
> > of the libs it used to include ?
>
> This would require something like
>
> Depends: libpam0g:i386, libssl098:i386, [...]
>
> and this syntax is not yet supported (intentionally, because there's a lot
> of policy that needs to be put in place before we allow such things).
>
> Ubuntu, faced with the same issue, kludged a bit to make upgrades possible.
>
> Package: ia32-libs
> Architecture: amd64
> Depends: ia32-libs-multiarch
>
> Package: ia32-libs-multiarch
> Architecture: i386
> Multi-Arch: foreign
> Depends: libpam0g, [...]
This isn't even that much of a kluge - ia32-libs is there to support
unpackaged (mostly non-free) software and so a metapackage that pulls
in libraries likely to be dependencies of that software remains
useful.
> This doesn't require us to support :arch syntax for dependencies anywhere
> yet; it just requires that the i386 arch is enabled via multiarch, and that
> the package manager is able to resolve the fact that ia32-libs' dependency
> is satisfied by the only copy of ia32-libs-multiarch available, the i386
> one.
>
> However, this still introduces at least some of the same policy problems -
> for instance, britney has to be taught that this is ok if you want to be
> able to migrate this package to testing automatically. And you need a
> multiarch-capable package manager installed and configured *before* you can
> upgrade this package, so that requires a two-step upgrade of some variety:
> either holding ia32-libs back until after the dist-upgrade, or upgrading the
> package manager before the dist-upgrade.
There is a similar issue with linux-image-*-amd64, which I would
definitely like to remove from i386 as soon as possible. We have
metapackages to help with this already, but we still need users to add
amd64 as a foreign architecture before upgrading.
Ben.
--
Ben Hutchings
We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.
- Albert Camus
Reply to: