[debhelper-devel] Bug#858467: Please expand on error message "No packages to build." when architectures do not match

[Michael Stapelberg]

Package: debhelper
Version: 10.2.5
Severity: normal

Currently, when trying to build a Debian package whose binary packages
specify “Architecture: arm64” on an amd64 machine, I get the following
error message:

raspi3-firmware $ dh clean
dh: No packages to build.

While this is technically correct, the error message could be way
friendlier: I’d suggest something along the lines of “No packages to
build (architecture mismatch: got amd64, want arm64)”.

What do you think?

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 9.0
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable-debug'), (500, 'testing-debug'), (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386, armel, mipsel, arm64

Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages debhelper depends on:
ii  autotools-dev            20161112.1
ii  binutils                 2.27.90.20170124-2
ii  dh-autoreconf            13
ii  dh-strip-nondeterminism  0.031-1
ii  dpkg                     1.18.22
ii  dpkg-dev                 1.18.22
ii  file                     1:5.29-3
ii  libdpkg-perl             1.18.22
ii  man-db                   2.7.6.1-2
ii  perl                     5.24.1-1
ii  po-debconf               1.0.20

debhelper recommends no packages.

Versions of packages debhelper suggests:
ii  dh-make  2.201608

-- no debconf information