Re: More expressive Multi-Arch field

[Andrej Shadura <andrew@shadura.me>]

On 19 April 2018 at 09:15, Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org> wrote:
>
> Hello Lumin,
>
> On Wed, 18 Apr 2018, Lumin wrote:
> > Compared to "same"/"foreign", the idea above provides a more
> > expressive and self-doc'd Multi-Arch field.
> >
> > Your opinion?
>
> I think that you have no idea of the amount of energy and discussion that
> went into Multi-Arch. While your proposed wording is nice, it fails to
> achieve the core goal of the field: express what kind of
> (cross-architectures) dependencies are allowed on the given package.
>
> And if you manage to remember that, it will be much easier to remember
> the meaning of the value:
> "same" -> only packages of the same architecture can depend on it
> "foreign" -> packages of different ("foreign") architectures can depend on it
> "allowed" -> a bit of both depending on the annotation of the dependency
> (":any" -> allowed, otherwise not allowed).

Interestingly, I rarely needed to have that knowledge, and when I did,
I always went from the actual values of this field to something like
what Lumin proposed, thought a bit, and then produced the result in my
head. When you know how the package can be installed, answers to other
questions appear semi-automatically in your head, but it’s not always
easy, in my opinion, to do this deduction in the opposite direction.

I do agree with Lumin the current set of values is not suitable to be
processed by average human beings :)

-- 
Cheers,
  Andrej