Big ugly build changes might be needed for Debian/Ubuntu

[Scott Ritchie]

On 05/21/2011 08:20 AM, Ove Kåven wrote:
> Den 19. mai 2011 20:58, skrev Scott Ritchie:
>> A side effect of this change, however, is the current build daemons ONLY
>> have packages for one architecture.  This means that, at build time, you
>> won't be able to pull in the 32-bit packages on a 64-bit build daemon.
> 
> Well, I don't see the problem. I've been more concerned that there's not
> yet any clean way to get the 64-bit package to depend on the 32-bit
> package, but for the build itself, it's quite trivial. (At least it was
> a year ago or so, and I can't imagine it has gotten worse since then.)
> 

Well now we can just Depends: wine:i386 or similar, I think.

>> From what I understand, this change is originating in Debian (and thus
>> propagating to Ubuntu).  I believe the motivations are mostly ease of
>> management of the build daemons -- only by doing this, for instance, can
>> an entire architecture be properly isolated and self-contained.
> 
> No. Very, very, far from it.
> 
> The multiarch specs are created and maintained by a Ubuntu (and Debian)
> developer, and the motivations are purely user-oriented - making it
> possible, easy, and reliable for the user to do things that's currently
> difficult, fragile, and error-prone. But for package maintainers, life
> will certainly be no easier.
> 

I don't mean the multiarch change, I mean the "build daemons will not
allow have foreign multiarch build dependencies" change, which I guess
isn't a change so much as it is a property of the new system.

You're quite right that multiarch proper is for users; it's something
I've been demanding for a while now.

> Multiarch has no management implications whatsoever for the build
> daemons. All official Debian architectures are perfectly self-contained
> as they are. (Some of them currently contain cross-compiled pieces of
> other architectures, which would go away, but that does not concern the
> build daemons or the infrastructure.)
> 
> 

Multiarch with foreign architecture build support would eliminate the
self-containment, wouldn't it?