Re: smarter way to differ architectures needed?

[Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au>]

Ian Jackson wrote:
>> I don't know what to do about this though. Perhaps there needs to be a
>> way to put the porters email address in bug reports by bug, so that the
>> maintainer can contact the porter if required.
>
>Perhaps bug should put in an Architecture: pseudo-header ?

Maybe - however, would you be always be able to identify the
porter from the architecture? IMHO, the porter could be anyone..

>> Note: According to the "Debian Developer's Reference", packages should
>> be ported with "dpkg-buildpackage -B -mporter-email"; I suspect that
>> some hurd porters have forgotten to include their E-Mail address,
>> however I don't fully understand the details, so I might be out-of-date
>> (ie looking at old packages) or just plain wrong. I am under the
>> impression that the name of the porter should appear under the
>> output of "dpkg -I <package>", as the Maintainer.
>
>No, it shouldn't.  There should possibly be a new field, but
>Maintainer is for the maintainer.

Is there a mistake in the "Debian Developer's Reference"???? I must
admit, I find it surprising, a new field would be better. Here is
an extract:

8.2 Guidelines for Porter Uploads

[...]

   The way to invoke dpkg-buildpackage is as dpkg-buildpackage -B
   -mporter-email. Of course, set porter-email to your email address.
   This will do a binary-only build of only the architecture-dependant
   portions of the package, using the `binary-arch' target in
   debian/rules.


I haven't tested it, but I presume that the "-m" option
overrides the value for "Maintainer", but the documentation
is a bit unclear on this.

Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au>