Neil Williams <codeh...@debian.org> writes: > On Tue, 29 Mar 2016 21:25:26 -0700 > Afif Elghraoui <a...@ghraoui.name> wrote: >> The package in question, circlator, depends on two >> architecture-dependent packages that can only build on amd64 and >> kfreebsd-amd64 currently. The package cannot migrate to testing >> because those dependencies are not available for i386 [1]. >> >> I am hoping there is a better solution to this problem than to work >> around this by changing this package's build architecture from "all" >> to "any-amd64" > > That's not a workaround, it is the correct fix for the error in the > original upload. The package cannot work on all architectures - the > fact that this is because of dependencies rather than the code within > the package is irrelevant. Unless the code in the package can > *transparently* omit the need for the dependency on architectures where > that dependency does not exist, then the package is not arch:all. > Installation alone is insufficient, the package needs to be usable on > all the architectures in the Architecture list.
No. It is arch:all if it contains no arch-specific binaries and doesn't require arch-specific dependencies (i.e. dependencies which should only appear on specific architectures like "foo [amd64]"). It should be fine if an arch:all package depends on binary packages that are not installable on all architectures. Otherwise a lot of arch:all packages that depend on, say, linux-specific binary packages would become arch:any which is not very useful. As far as I remember, the testing migration script checks installability of arch:all packages on amd64 and i386, and there are manual workarounds for arch:all packages that are not installable on these architectures. Cc'ed the release team to take a look too. Ansgar
