Hi
If we limit the problem to avoiding build failures in cases that
upstream does not support, there would be the trivial solution of
having a package ship Provides like:
- architecture-is-64bit
- architecture-is-32bit
- architecture-is-little-endian
- architecture-is-big-endian
- architecture-has-64bit-timet
-...
Build-Depends: architecture-is-64bit, architecture-is-little-endian,...
would be a package that only supports 64bit little endian architectures,
and that would never be attempted to build on 32bit or big endian
architectures.
The buildd page would then show for i386:
mypackage build-depends on missing:
- architecture-is-64bit
Not building a source package on one specific architecture could already
today be achieved with:
Build-Depends: package-is-broken-on-ppc64el [ppc64el],...
This might not be the most elegant solution, but it should be sufficient
to solve the problem in this thread and it does not require any tool changes.
I find it both simple and elegant -- and it's probably pretty efficient too.
Perhaps there should be a conventional naming scheme for such virtual packages ; say deb-missing-feature, deb-unsupported-architecture or some such?
J.Puydt