+++ Holger Levsen [2016-05-03 11:33 +0200]: > On Tue, May 03, 2016 at 11:23:40AM +0200, Francois Gouget wrote: > > So I looked to see whether the Debian Policy was saying multi-arch is a > > should, a must or something else. > > > > It turns out it does not say anything of value: multi-arch is mentioned > > as being an exception to the FHS in section "9.1.1 File System > > Structure" and in footnotes 60, 78 and 79. That's all! > > yes, that's rather odd and annoying. it would be great if someone could > pick up the existing work and make sure Multi-Arch *is* properly > documented in policy…
Yes, it's very embarassing that it's not in policy. However, I tried once and found that it was hard! The form of the multiarch spec is very different to the form of policy. And as soon as you start to write policy you realise that you need to know about all sorts of corner cases. Trying to find out those caused us to discover that apt and dpkg disgreed which didn't help with documentation. At last year's debconf mini-sprint we sorted out those inconsistencies (by deciding to do it as dpkg did), and I believe that apt and aptitude have been changed to match. However SFAIK no-one has tried again to update policy (including me). Yes, lots of people have noticed that it needs doing. Not that many people understand it well enough to do so. I've not got any spare cycles at the moment (climate change action a more pressing issue than Debian's policiy omissions :-) but I will try and help if someone gets enthused, and I might get back to another attempt in a few months if not. > > That does not seem compatible with multi-arch being a completed goal of > > the old-stable release. So what about adding a section like this: > > there are already 7 or so bugs about multi-arch missing in various > places in policy, I'd suggest you go to the BTS, search for those and > help there. Right. Wookey -- Principal hats: Linaro, Debian, Wookware, ARM http://wookware.org/
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