Re: substvar in Arch:

[Goswin Brederlow <goswin.brederlow@student.uni-tuebingen.de>]

Stefano Zacchiroli <zack@debian.org> writes:

> Hi mentors,
>   is possible to have an Arch: field defined by a substvar?
> 
> Our problem (with our = debian ocaml maintainers) is that ocaml native
> code compiler isn't available for all architectures supported by debian,
> and, even if we have a bytecode compiler available everywhere, we can
> want to have a package built only on architectures which ship a native
> code compiler.
> 
> We like to avoid listing in the Arch field all the architectures
> supporting a native code compiler, so we are thinking as something like
> a substvar which define the Arch field gathering information from a file
> present on the filesystem (maybe shipped along with the ocaml or
> ocaml-base package).
> 
> Is this kind of solution feasible?

I asked on #debian-devel (IRC) and was told that a Build-depend on
ocaml-nativ-ompiler is the way to go. The package would then be build
on all archs having the compiler and fail on others. This should not
prevent the package from going into testing or stable as long as no
previous package exists for one of the failing archs.

MfG
        Goswin