Re: Handling Multi-Arch packages that must be installed for every enabled architecture?

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Josh Triplett writes ("Handling Multi-Arch packages that must be installed for every enabled architecture?"):
> That would solve the problem for the couple of cases it has come up in,
> but it seems far from ideal; I'd welcome an cleaner alternative
> solution.  Notably, this doesn't work well for plugin packages for
> libraries less critical than glibc; it's not even ideal for PAM, as not
> every enabled architecture will have packages depending on libpam0g.
> The real dependency is "if any package on the architecture depends on
> package X, and package Y is installed, package Y:arch must be
> installed", but that's excessively complicated.
> 
> Any ideas on how to solve this problem?

I don't have really good suggestions, but I wanted to mention two
additional problems which are very nearby:

* LD_PRELOAD hacks need their .so installing for all architecture "for
  which they are going to be used" (whatever that means)

* The language plugin problem.

Ian.