Cross-upgrading packages with multiarch packages

[Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org>]

Hello,

I'd like to seek feedback about what kind of upgrades dpkg should support
with multi-arch packages.

dpkg treats foo:native and foo:all like the same package and it's thus
possible to upgrade foo_1.0_all to foo_2.0_<native> and vice-versa.

However if you have installed foo_1.0_<foreign>, you can't upgrade that
package to foo_2.0_all (and vice-versa). Same goes for foo_1.0_<foreign1> to
foo_1.0_<foreign2> (provided they are not multi-arch: same, otherwise they
could coexist). You have to remove the conflicting package first and
reinstall afterwards.

In a similar vein, if you have several instances of the same package
(Multi-Arch: same, say foo_1.0_<native> and foo_1.0_<foreign>), you can't
install foo_2.0_all because it's in conflict with foo_1.0_<foreign>.


Is this behaviour what we want?

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer

Follow my Debian News ▶ http://RaphaelHertzog.com (English)
                      ▶ http://RaphaelHertzog.fr (Français)