Re: Experimental ddeb support in debhelper and lintian (Was: Re: -dbg packages; are they actually useful?)

[Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net>]

On 2015-05-02 13:46, David Kalnischkies wrote:
> On Fri, May 01, 2015 at 11:46:42PM +0200, Niels Thykier wrote:
>> […] ddeb support […]
> 
> +1. \o/
> 
> 
>>    - apt now properly handles the "pkg:arch" dependency.
> 
> [...]
> 
> I would revert the revert as this is potentially causing more trouble
> than the "problems" it is trying to solve (aka: I don't see why a debug
> package has to depend on the package it provides symbols for at all. If
> any the relation should be 'Enhances'…).
> 
> 
> Best regards
> 
> David Kalnischkies
> 

I add the depends for the following reasons:

 * It is what we do with manual -dbg packages today and it is what
   people seem to expect.
 * It allows me to trivially deploy a doc-symlink to avoid an extra
   copy of the copyright file to create policy compliant debs.

Now, IRT the "pkg:arch" dependency - it was to ensure that the you get
the correct variant of your debug package.  I can certainly appreciate
that the (original?) Multi-arch spec does not support this for
"Multi-arch: foreign"[1].
  We have now ended up in a situation where people has made their own
interpretation of how to handle this situation rending "pkg:arch"
dependencies useless when "pkg" is multi-arch:foreign.  It is what
happens when people have to guess what something means. :)

Thankfully, we got a solution that works perfectly for any other
multi-arch value and "foreign" is just a minor inconvenience when APT
guesses wrong on the (architecture for the) debug package.

Thanks,
~Niels

[1] As I recall, it does not really mention the "pkg:arch" dependencies.
 But it is a couple of years since I last read it, so I am quite
possibly wrong here.