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Re: Bootstrapping a foreign architecture with multiarch



Hi,

(I'm not commenting on the approach used by multistrap in general, I just
reply to your questions)

On Wed, 02 Mar 2011, Neil Williams wrote:
> What will happen with maintainer scripts of Multi-Arch packages when
> installed alongside native packages? Why are these being retained if
> they cannot be executed?

The scripts are executed. That just means that Multi-Arch: same package
should avoid use of binary executables as maintainer scripts.

But a maintainer script implemented as a shell script can use any program
whose presence is guaranteed by the dependencies, just as usual, whatever
its arch.

> > 3/ Any program that assumes the current layout of control files
> >    (/var/lib/dpkg/info/<package>.<something>) will be broken (at
> > least for some packages) since the layout will change to support
> > Multi-Arch: same packages that can be co-installed.
> > 
> >    You should use "dpkg-query --control-path <package> <something>" to
> >    retrieve the path of the file. This has been introduced in dpkg
> > 1.15.4 and is thus in squeeze already.
> 
> 1. Which packages currently show this behaviour? dpkg doesn't show any
> change in the --control-path setting for dpkg itself.

The change will only take place once we roll out multiarch... if you use
one of my snapshot you already have a different value here (it embeds the
architecture string). But that's not the definitive layout, see below.

> 2. What are the changes in /var/lib/dpkg/info/* ?

Multi-Arch: same packages will use
/var/lib/dpkg/info/<package>:<arch>.<something>

> For Multistrap, every file in /var/lib/dpkg/ has to be created by
> multistrap, based on the data obtained from dpkg -e (basically the
> DEBIAN/ content). This data needs only to be sufficient that dpkg can
> correctly configure the packages once dpkg itself is able to be
> executed inside the new filesystem.

It's sufficient, you just need to know the value of the Multi-Arch field.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer

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


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