multiarch-apt: different arches in different repositories
Hi David, I just tried out your fine work on apt, as I'm looking at
the whole current state of cross-installing in debian and ubuntu.
One thing I noticed immediately is that we don't appear to have a
syntax for dealing with the case where different arches have different
repositories. e.g ubuntu put amd64 in
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu maverick main universe
and armel in
deb http://ports.ubuntu.com/ maverick main universe
Clearly this is not an issue on Debian, for released ports, but in
practice this sort of situation is likely to arise quite often as any
new port will end up in debian-ports or some other private repo.
Now it does appear to work as things stand, because you can just list
both repos and the relevant packages/sources files are found, but you
get errors about the missing ones, which is at best confusing for
users, and may cause breakage.
I think we need some way of dealing with this.
A syntax for specifying which architectures a repository line includes
is the most obvious solution.
I don't know if anyone has any other plan in mind. In principle apt
could work it out itself from a given list of deb/deb-src lines, and
just quietly ignore the missing ones so long as there is at least one
supplied, but that could get complicated?
I may have missed that there is already some config option for this,
in which case please point me at some docs.
and cheers for the good work
Wookey
--
Principal hats: Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM
http://wookware.org/
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