Re: Please test gzip -9n - related to dpkg with multiarch support
+++ Russ Allbery [2012-02-08 13:47 -0800]:
> Neil Williams <codehelp@debian.org> writes:
> > Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:
>
> Oh, good point, I'd forgotten that for multiarch the symlink is
> architecture-dependent. So yes, the -dev package is inherently
> architecture-dependent.
>
> > I would drop the .a but that doesn't mean I can make the -dev package
> > Multi-Arch: foreign.
>
> You're right. -dev packages are going to have to be multi-arch: same.
>
> I think the hardest problem is then going to be the documentation
> (including man pages) that are normally now in the -dev package, and any
> -config scripts or the like. We already have multiarch path solutions for
> header files and for the symlinks, although it requires duplicating the
> header files for each architecture.
This part of the thread is getting into the general problem of what
exactly the spec and guidelines to packagers should be for multi-arch
-dev packages.
We have purposely concentrated so far on the library packages in the
detailed spec and left the -dev packaging details a bit vague to see
exactly what the issues were. (and it is rather less important for -dev
packages to actually be co-installable, because you can get by by just
installing one or the other for cross- building purposes, although
co-installability is definately desireable IMHO).
I was thinking of starting a thread on this anyway soon, but as we are
now discussing it anyway it might be a good time to go over the
various issues.
Some of the issues are already clear I think (moving arch-dependent
headers into arch-qualified dirs, but leaving the others where they
are), but the docs haven't cught up, and there are some trickier bits
(like foo-config files where upstream don't want to move to
pkg-config, and to what degree it is worthwhile making all -dev
packages co-installable), that need some discusion and packages that
probably just want splitting up (ones with a lot of binary utilities
in).
I'll start a new thread with some doc pointers and list of issues.
Wookey
--
Principal hats: Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM
http://wookware.org/
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