[debhelper-devel] Bug#766795: afterstep not binnmu safe and not installable in sid

[Simon McVittie]

On 02/11/14 21:16, Robert Luberda wrote:
>> The solution I used in telepathy-glib was to link the documentation of
>> all arch-dependent packages to the shared library (which in practice
>> they all depend on anyway), and leave the one arch-independent
>> package alone:
> 
> Which means that you assume that nobody will never do binNMU of the
> arch-independent package :)

No, our arch-independent package ships its own independent
/usr/share/doc subdirectory which will always contain its appropriate
changelog, so it doesn't need any dependency on the library (let alone a
lockstep dependency).

If your arch-dep and arch-indep packages *do* have a versioned
dependency relationship for other reasons (e.g. the arch-dep package is
not just documentation), then because arch-dep and arch-indep can
already have version skew, you *already* have to either assume that
arch-indep will never be binNMU'd (which is a safe assumption until
Debian's buildd infrastructure knows how to build Architecture:all
packages, at which point there will be much rejoicing):

    Package: foo-bin
    Depends: foo-common (= ${source:Version})

or use a slightly less strict relationship, perhaps something like this:

    Package: foo-bin
    Depends: foo-common (>= ${source:Version}),
             foo-common (<= ${binary:Version})

Regards,
    S