Bug#612958: apt and dpkg configured separately for multiarch?

[David Kalnischkies <kalnischkies+debian@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 22:39, Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> wrote:
> Since 'dpkg -i' and 'apt-get install' should both have the same view of the
> world, I think apt should be pulling this information from dpkg - which it
> can do with 'dpkg --print-foreign-architectures'.  (This command will
> obviously fail on pre-multiarch dpkg, in which case no extra architectures
> should be enabled.)

Is the output of this command ordered?
(Or, where can i find a 'stable' multiarch dpkg branch i can observe?)

APT::Architectures provides a way to define an order of preference of archs
(lets say amd64 by default, ia64 as fallback and i386 in worst case), so it
would be good if the output would be in the same order as given on
commandline (or by cfg file) and if this would have the meaning of giving
one architecture a preference over the other.

Foreign suggests further more that the native architecture is not in the list.
Thats properly okay for dpkg again, but APT needs a way to choose
between different architectures - and if we assume that we have in the future
partial architectures it would make sense to have a preference order of e.g.
'i686', 'i586', 'i486', 'i386' where native is 'i386' as the only complete
arch…


Best regards

David Kalnischkies