In the days when we had the horrors of apt-cross, there was a theory about how Multi-Arch might work and how that might affect both apt-cross and dpkg-cross. This theory turns out to be wrong.
So, the Wiki has been updated and the dpkg-cross package will change behaviour once the current version has migrated into Wheezy. Multi-Arch packages are easy for dpkg-cross to recognise correctly and Multi-Arch packages won't arrive in the main Debian archive until dpkg in Debian is capable of handling such packages. This means that dpkg will need to be able to install a 32bit Multi-Arch package alongside a 64bit Multi-Arch package on the same system. As this is no different, from a Multi-Arch perspective, to installing an armel package alongside an x86 package, there is no need for dpkg-cross to support a transitional state. -cross packages will simply die out. Multi-Arch packages will be left untouched by dpkg-cross (if dpkg-cross is given a path, the original file is copied to the current directory without conversion so that it remains available for installation). Part of this transition will be that the migrations to Multi-Arch will necessarily break things if packages are converted to Multi-Arch before the build-dependencies and runtime dependencies of the same package. Hence, -cross packages will disappear from the ground up. There will then come a point where particular builds will only have a few non-Multi-Arch packages left and maintainers can be nagged to convert these few. some of the config data in dpkg-cross can then be migrated into dpkg and dpkg-cross can be removed from Debian. Naturally, xapt will disappear with dpkg-cross and pdebuild-cross will be converted to simply make the toolchains available inside a pbuilder chroot - if that step turns out to still be necessary by the time Multi-Arch is at this stage. We now have a route to a sane cross-building platform without poorly hacked -cross packages. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
