Bug#217014: apt-utils: [apt-ftparchive] add Architecture filter support

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

Hi,

On Wed, Oct 22, 2003 at 09:55:04PM -0600, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> On Wed, 22 Oct 2003, Guillem Jover wrote:
> > I'm using apt-ftparchive with a pool style repository, but it did not
> > filter the debs to be put on Packages depending on Architecture. So
> > every package in the pool was repeated in every Packages file regardless
> > of its Architecture.

> Correct. That is really the defined behavior for this function.

Sure for SimpleGenPackages (emulating dpkg-scanpackages) and for
LoanBinDir, neither of those have a concept of an architecture or an
archive structure. But LoadTree has the concept of architectures and I
think it should be its expected behaviour, this is the only one in my
patch that's filtering by architecture.

> If you change it to use the architecture field then I fear there is a risk
> it could break someone elses configuration.

Yes the posibility is always there, so anyway if you feel the previous is
not enough, I could add a command line argument to enable on demand arch
filtering on LoadTree. What do you think?

> With a pool it is expected that some other program will make the
> selections as to which package goes into which packagefile via the
> FileList setting. This is better because it doesn't have to scan the .debs
> to determine the architecture.

Yes for the distribution I'll have to do that, scan for .changes files.
But the debs have to be scanned anyway to process the Overrides for
example.

> If you are using the usual filenames you can just use a simple find
> command to produce the file lists before invoking apt.

And I think it's more efficient and errorproof to be done by
apt-ftparchive, but I my be wrong ;>.

regards,
guillem