Big ugly build changes might be needed for Debian/Ubuntu

[Ove Kåven]

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.)

> 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.

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.)