Hi, TL;DR Dpkg does the useful thing, apt-get build-dep doesn't.
I've just been getting a setup working for Debian cross-building. At work I use OpenEmbedded which is a time consuming pain in the neck. I hope to get to a work flow that can replace crappy embedded vendor toolchains but for the moment I'm following Wookie's recipe at https://wiki.debian.org/CrossToolchains which complements his talk at Cambridge mini-debconf. To the extent that there is any maintainer-supported user-level cross building support in Debian, this seems to be it from my reading. However this bug is a significant blocker to that work process. Several of the basic Priority Essential packages won't cross-build with target != host because of the current bug. dpkg-checkbuilddeps already allows Arch:all Multi-Arch:none packages to satisfy build-depends. I've built apt with the patch here and this allows "apt-get build-dep" to do the useful thing also. Both the failures in the attached log go away with this patch to apt. Please therefore can this patch be applied and released ? Many thanks Nick Leverton
[jessie-amd64-sbuild-tar: leveret@warren ~/src/apt-1.0.9.3]$ apt-get -s build-dep apt dpkg -a armhf Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done E: Build-Depends dependency for apt cannot be satisfied because the package docbook-xml cannot be found [jessie-amd64-sbuild-tar: leveret@warren ~/src/apt-1.0.9.3]$ apt-get -s build-dep dpkg -a armhf Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done E: Build-Depends dependency for dpkg cannot be satisfied because the package libtimedate-perl cannot be found
