Migration path for 'Multi-Arch:allowed' packages

[Michael Gilbert <mgilbert@debian.org>]

Hi,

We've been getting a few bug reports from users attempting to install
multiarch wine who have yet to manually enable multiarch itself.
Obviously that is a failure on their part, and is easily correctable.
However, I wonder if we can't make such migrations a bit more
straightforward?

In particular, I filed a bug against dpkg requesting that it produce
more informative error messages in these cases [0], but I wonder if a
part of the solution shouldn't be more automated or at least presented
at a higher level through apt/aptitude, etc?

Also, limitations in the existing testing migration tools are making
wine not considered for wheezy, since those tools don't check whether
dependencies for 'Multi-Arch: allowed' packages are satisfied by
packages on other architectures.

Best wishes,
Mike

[0] http://bugs.debian.org/676822
[1] http://packages.qa.debian.org/w/wine.html