Package: libicu-dev Version: 57.1-5 Followup-For: Bug #837898
This bug breaks Wine development. A lot of Windows applications are 32 bit applications which can only be run in a 32 bit process, so from a 32 bit Wine binary loading 32 bit Linux libraries. But a growing number of applications are 64 bit so that Wine developers really need to be able to build both the 32 and 64 bit versions of Wine on their machine. One of the packages that Wine depends on and which is needed by many Windows applications is libxml2-dev which depends on libicu-dev. So the lack of multiarch support translates into the lack support fo important Windows features like .Net applications, MSI (half the applications installers), gameux, mshtml and urlmon. So because libicu-dev no longer supports multiarch, libxml2-dev's multiarch support is all for nothing and Wine development is hampered. > I had a quick look into it and this is blocked by /usr/bin/icu-config > being arch specific. Not sure if there is an easy solution. Since this is a regression from version 52.1-8+deb8u4 and 55.1-7 I looked into them and from my perspective they had the obvious and correct fix: icu-config belongs to icu-devtools, a Multi-Arch: foreign package. I also found bug 776821 which claims that was causing other problems: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=776821 That bug said the right fix was to get rid of icu-config. However I am not seeing any movement towards that so until that ball gets rolling it's just not a solution at all. So that leaves another proposed solution: * moving most of libicu-dev to libicu-dev-multiarch which would be m-a:same * make libicu-dev m-a:no and keep icu-config in it * make libxml2-dev depend on libicu-dev-multiarch and add a build-dep on libicu-dev. This would make libxml2-dev usable again for multiarch development without impacting other packages (unless they too want better multiarch support). -- System Information: Debian Release: 9.0 APT prefers testing APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'stable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fr_FR.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) Versions of packages libicu-dev depends on: ii icu-devtools 57.1-5 ii libc6-dev [libc-dev] 2.24-8 ii libicu57 57.1-5 ii libstdc++-5-dev [libstdc++-dev] 5.4.1-4 ii libstdc++-6-dev [libstdc++-dev] 6.2.1-5 libicu-dev recommends no packages. Versions of packages libicu-dev suggests: pn icu-doc <none> -- no debconf information
