Package: gwenhywfar-tools Version: 4.20.0-1 User: helm...@debian.org Usertags: rebootstrap Control: affects -1 + src:libaqbanking
Dear gwenhywfar maintainers, libaqbanking fails to cross build from source, because it fails running xmlmerge with an Exec format error. That indicates that gwenhywfar-tools was installed for the wrong architecture. Usually that means it should be marked Multi-Arch: foreign. While doing so is quite easy, figuring out whether that marking is actually correct is less so. The problem typically is that the people with package-specific knowledge have little knowledge of multiarch and the people with multiarch knowledge know little of the package. So neither can answer the question on their own. I'm of the latter kind. Please help me understand whether the marking is correct. For the Multi-Arch: foreign marking one has to look at the API a package provides to other packages. For instance, the Debian policy says that /usr/share/doc/$pkg must not be assumed available (12.3), so these files do not contribute to the API. Besides documentation, gwenhywfar-tools provides programs and includes. The question that arises is: Does the behaviour of these programs depend on the architecture they're being run on? Are the data files they consume or produce architecture-dependent? Are the headers architecture-dependent? For xmlmerge, the answer is relatively obvious: As XML is a textual format, it is independent of the processor architecture. In the absence of any architecture-dependence, the Multi-Arch: foreign marking is correct. Please help me understand whether there is any architecture-dependence in any of the other tools or headers. If there is not, please mark gwenhywfar-tools Multi-Arch: foreign. If there is, please close this bug saying why. If unsure, please enter a discussion on this bug such that we can find out together. Thanks for your help Helmut
