Re: Time to drop debcheck on optional/extra and arch:all?

[Ansgar Burchardt <ansgar@debian.org>]

Hi,

Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:
> Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> writes:
>> I think this illustrates a couple of minor deficiencies wrt Debian and
>> arch-independent packages. There isn't any way to have depends that
>> should be only for certain arches.
>
> Yes, which is because of the deeper problem that architecture restrictions
> in dependency fields are a preprocessor feature instead of a feature of
> the dependency system.  So you can use architecture-specific dependencies,
> but only for architecture-specific packages.  (Hm.  I see that isn't
> documented in Policy at all -- I do have this right, don't I?)

It is documented in section 7.1: "This means that architecture
restrictions must not be used in binary relationship fields for
architecture-independent packages (Architecture: all)".

Ansgar