Multi-arch and dependencies on arch: all packages

[Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org>]

Hi,

Steve reported me this problem concerning the current implementation of
the multiarch spec (he uses my latest pu/multiarch/snapshot/* branch).

Le mercredi 09 févr. 2011, Steve Langasek a écrit :
>  - I've just marked tzdata (an Architecture: all package) as Multi-Arch:
>    foreign in the Ubuntu archive because I noticed my test libc6 package
>    (libc6 depends on tzdata in Ubuntu but not in Debian) failed to install,
>    listing this dependency as one of the reasons.  At first I was going to
>    report this as a bug, but then I remembered this:
>    https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MultiarchSpec#Dependencies%20involving%20Architecture:%20all%20packages
> 
>    Now dpkg fails to install this package at all, with this error:
> 
>  parsing file '/var/lib/dpkg/tmp.ci/control' near line 18 package 'tzdata':
>  package has multiarch field but is architecture all
> 
>    And doing so complies with this requirement from the spec:
> 
>    "Setting the Multi-Arch field on a package which is Architecture: all is
>    considered an error. dpkg-deb must refuse to generate a .deb with this
>    combination of values. Behavior when trying to install such a package is
>    undefined."
> 
>    (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MultiarchSpec#Binary%20package%20control%20fields)
> 
>    These two requirements are clearly in conflict.  I've updated the wiki
>    page to make it clear that only Multi-Arch: same is disallowed for
>    Architecture: all packages.  Please update the dpkg implementation to
>    match when you have a chance.

I think it's wrong to (have to) add the Multi-Arch field to architecture
all packages. I would rather suggest that we consider them as
automatically satisfying any dependency (i.e. the Multi-Arch: foreign
would be implicit).

What do other people think?

An architecture all package that provides something arch specific is
very rare and it's often meant to be used in situation where you precisely
want to make this available to other architectures (i.e. syslinux-common).

So I don't think that we have to go through all the trouble to whitelist
them one by one.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Freexian SARL ◈ Tel: 06 88 21 35 47
http://www.freexian.com