On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 06:09:38PM -0700, Don Armstrong wrote: > On Tue, 24 Jun 2014, Frédéric Brière wrote: > > Marking all packages providing wordlist as "Multi-Arch: foreign" would > > allow them to satisfy dependencies from packages of foreign > > architectures. […] > 2) This particular issue in scowl itself would be trivially fixed by > #666772, which has a patch, and has been open for two years with that > patch... > > While I don't see a problem with adding this particular fix to scowl (it > really is Multi-Arch: foreign), we should just fix this archive-wide > once and for all.
Note that this apt bug refers to cross-building only, not the general case of (any) dependency on an arch:all package as - as the bug says itself - the general case is potentially dangerous while cross-building is a "new" feature so we could 'break' it left and right. Additional, this is a first-level only change, in other words: Only the arch:all packages the package you want to cross-build are effected by this magic M-A:foreign addition. Anything brought in as a dependency of a dependency is still not magically foreign. There were a bunch of other magic ideas like arch:all packages without any dependencies and so forth, but it usually boils down to a rather simple counter: multi-arch is a relatively complicated beast, do we want to make it even more complex to understand? There are certainly cases in which "magic" would have made sense anyhow, but I am not sure it is a good idea to change it now after 1½ releases supporting it differently – and more importantly for me personally: APT isn't going to support any of this before dpkg does. Once bitten, twice shy… Best regards David Kalnischkies
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