Hi Thibaut, On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 08:50:24PM +0200, Thibaut Girka wrote: > A small set of packages would benefit from explicit arch qualifiers in > *-Depends. Indeed, a cross-compiler, for instance, is meant to run on a > certain (build) architecture and use libs from the foreign (host) > architecture. This isn't actually possible in Debian, since the MultiArch > spec only allows the “:any” qualifier, and dpkg actually reject anything > different from “any”. Yes, this is disallowed in the current multiarch specification, but is an area for future expansion in connection with the building of cross-compilers and similar cases. At last DebConf, the release team and ftp team agreed that this is a reasonable thing to support, though we don't yet have a roadmap for how to get there. > 2. Should a package be able to depend on a package regardless of its M-A > field? I think it only makes sense for a package to depend on a > “M-A: same” or “M-A: allowed” package, “M-A: foreign” packages > providing arch-independent interfaces, and M-A unaware packages > probably being unwanted. On the other hand, explicitly disallowing > other packages would probably be unnecessary work. If we're going to support explicit cross-arch dependencies, I believe they should be allowed regardless of the M-A field on the target package. Certainly, there's no reason to permit it for M-A: allowed packages but not for M-A: none packages, since an M-A: allowed package is always treated as either M-A: foreign or M-A: none. And even for an M-A: foreign package, there might be special circumstances where you want to specify the architecture, such as when creating a metapackage of some kind. Cheers, -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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