Re: Time to drop debcheck on optional/extra and arch:all?
Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> writes:
> On Sun, Aug 10, 2014 at 7:31 PM, Neil Williams wrote:
>> Do we care about any distinction between optional and extra any longer?
> I would say no we don't and suggest these steps:
> Remove it from policy:
> https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive.html#s-priorities
> Get dak to override all extra packages to optional.
> Drop extra handling from debcheck.
Agreed.
> 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?)
Elevating architecture-specific dependencies to a first-class part of the
syntax seems like a good long-term improvement to me, although of course
everything that parses dependency fields will need to be updated, which is
daunting.
> There isn't any way to restrict which arches list arch-independent
> packages in their package lists.
That would be very nice.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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