Bug#629648: lintian: missing-pre-dependency-on-multiarch-support FP for -dev packages

[Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org>]

Package: lintian
Version: 2.5.0
Severity: normal

I've been converting libdbus/experimental to multiarch. It has nearly the
layout you'd expect, except that the shared library is in /lib:

    libdbus-1-dev
        /usr/lib/MULTIARCH/libdbus-1.a
        /usr/lib/MULTIARCH/libdbus-1.so -> /lib/MULTIARCH/libdbus-1.so.3.6.1
    libdbus-1-3
        /lib/MULTIARCH/libdbus-1.so.3.6.1
        /lib/MULTIARCH/libdbus-1.so.3 -> libdbus-1.so.3.6.1

It looks as though checks/files considers the .so symlink to be enough for
libdbus-1-dev to require a dependency on multiarch-support. However,
nothing should be using libdbus-1.so at runtime (the SONAME is libdbus-1.so.3),
so whether we've upgraded the dynamic linker before unpacking libdbus-1-dev
is irrelevant.

debhelper doesn't put multiarch-support in libdbus-1-dev's
${misc:Pre-Depends}, resulting in an auto-rejected Lintian error unless I
explicitly add multiarch-support to Pre-Depends.

Perhaps you could relax the check, so that only real files (not symlinks)
in a multiarch directory are considered to be a reason for needing
multiarch-support? (That would match what dh_makeshlibs does.)

    S

-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (101, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.39-1-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages lintian depends on:
ii  binutils              2.21.52.20110606-1 The GNU assembler, linker and bina
ii  diffstat              1.54-1             produces graph of changes introduc
ii  dpkg-dev              1.16.0.3           Debian package development tools
ii  file                  5.04-5+b1          Determines file type using "magic"
ii  gettext               0.18.1.1-3         GNU Internationalization utilities
ii  intltool-debian       0.35.0+20060710.1  Help i18n of RFC822 compliant conf
ii  libapt-pkg-perl       0.1.24+b2          Perl interface to libapt-pkg
ii  libclass-accessor-per 0.34-1             Perl module that automatically gen
ii  libemail-valid-perl   0.184-1            Perl module for checking the valid
ii  libipc-run-perl       0.89-1             Perl module for running processes
ii  libparse-debianchange 1.2.0-1            parse Debian changelogs and output
ii  libtimedate-perl      1.2000-1           collection of modules to manipulat
ii  liburi-perl           1.58-1             module to manipulate and access UR
ii  locales               2.13-5             Embedded GNU C Library: National L
ii  locales-all [locales] 2.13-5             Embedded GNU C Library: Precompile
ii  man-db                2.6.0.2-1          on-line manual pager
ii  perl [libdigest-sha-p 5.12.3-7           Larry Wall's Practical Extraction 
ii  unzip                 6.0-4              De-archiver for .zip files

lintian recommends no packages.

Versions of packages lintian suggests:
ii  binutils-multiarch    2.21.52.20110606-1 Binary utilities that support mult
ii  libhtml-parser-perl   3.68-1+b1          collection of modules that parse H
ii  libtext-template-perl 1.45-2             Text::Template perl module
ii  man-db                2.6.0.2-1          on-line manual pager

-- no debconf information