Re: Debian GNU [was: smarter way to differ architectures needed?]

[Richard Braakman <dark@xs4all.nl>]

Gordon Matzigkeit wrote:
> [Brian, your summary of the idea is nearly perfect.  Thanks for taking
> the time to explain this in a clear way that I wasn't able to.  I
> really depend on people such as you to interpret my grunts and
> hand-waving and come up with a coherent explanation that makes sense
> to other people. ;)]
> 
> To reduce confusion: the new symbol we're talking about is really just
> `XOR' (exclusive OR), and the old symbol is `OR' (plain old inclusive
> OR).  In keeping with dpkg's convention of using the C bitwise
> operators, let's make the new operator `^' instead of `||'.

I've read Brian's summary, but I still don't see the point of this
operator.  It seems that what you want to accomplish can be 
done just as easily with:

Depends: hwarch-${Arch}, ${shlibs:Depends}

And this is with less hardcoding to boot; there's no need for
dpkg to know what to do with "hwarch-sparc ^ hwarch-i386".
The standard variable substitution facility is quite powerful.

Richard Braakman