+++ Bertrand Marc [2015-08-13 09:42 +0200]: > Dear developpers, > > I am trying to fix Debian bug #783875 [1]: playonlinux (which is arch > independant) should depend on the 32 bits version of wine. Therefore I > added a dependency on wine32|wine32-development, but it seems the > package will not migrate to testing [2], because wine32 is not available > on amd64.
So playonlinux should depend on wine32 for arches where it exists (which is i386, kfreebsd-i386, and powerpc)? But on 64-bit arches it should depend on wine32:<some foreign arch>? should playonlinux on ppc64el depend on wine32:powerpc? (It's not currently built on ppc64el, and maybe it makes no sense there, I just note that wine32 is built on powerpc so this isn't just an x86 thing?) > Niels Thykier suggested on mentors that this could be an issue with the > testing migration code [3], so I send this question to debian-release@ too. > > I thought I should instead add a dependency on wine32:any | > wine32-development:any and ask the wine maintainer to move to > multiarch:allowed. That seems plausible, but I'm not quite sure what the actual restrictions you want are. If you are at debconf you might want to drop in to the marathon multiarch BoF where this could be clarified. If not, lets work it out here. > But the best source on this subject is an Ubuntu > one [4]. I cannot find any reliable Debian source about this The Multiarch spec https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MultiarchSpec was written up on the ubuntu wiki because the initial implementation was done there, but it absolutely should be considered a Debian spec as well as an Ubuntu one. It should have been converted into policy some time ago, but it's actually quite hard to re-write in that form, and as you will see from the list of issues for the multiarch BoF at debconf, there actually remain quite a few corner-cases that need to be resolved before a definitive spec can be produced. Hopefully that will be finalised this week and it will finally make it into policy. > and it seems I was wrong [3]. > > Could you give me a pointer on this ? Or do you know any > package with a dependency on a package from an other arch ? The only other packages in the archive with dependencies on other (explicit) arches are multiarch-built (wdotap) cross-compilers (https://wiki.debian.org/MultiarchCrossToolchainBuild). So far as I know wine and cross-compilers are the only two areas where explicit cross-arch dependencies are appropriate, but there may be a couple of others. e.g: gcc-4.9-arm-linux-gnueabihf in unstable depends on libgcc-4.9-dev:armhf Such packages cannot currently migrate into testing as britney does not check foreign arches for dependencies. Such dependencies have been dealt with in the past (e.g for ia32-libs) by declaring fake dependencies in britney to packages wanting them them to migrate. This is very hacky. We propose to do this properly now by correctly checking the dependencies against foreign arches, and allowing migration for packages on a whitelist, with dependencies on whitelisted arches. This allows the release team to ensure this functionality is only used when appropriate. But in your case I'm not sure that you need any of this. Wookey -- Principal hats: Linaro, Debian, Wookware, ARM http://wookware.org/
