[Multiarch-devel] cross-architecture conflicts or equivalent for libc packages

[Aurelien Jarno]

On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 06:04:22PM +0200, Aurelien Jarno wrote:
> On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 12:09:28PM -0700, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
> > Aurelien Jarno wrote:
> > 
> > > As a subsidiary question, do you know how to prevent libc6-amd64:i386 to
> > > be installed on a native amd64 system, but allow it on an i386 system,
> > > even with libc6:amd64 already installed?
> > 
> > Use Conflicts against dpkg:amd64, maybe. :(
> 
> I have been looking at this issue a bit more in details. libc biarch
> packages have never been designed with multiarch in mind, and thus they
> are not tagged as multiarch packages (implicit Multi-arch: none). However
> since multiarch, as the Multi-arch: field only concerns dependencies, and
> that such packages do not have Depends: beside the libc6 one, they are
> suddenly installable as foreign packages.
> 
> That's why we suddenly have for example conflicts issue between 
> libc6-dev-i386 and libc6-dev-mips64 (#702962) or libc6-dev-i386 and
> libc6-dev-mips64 (#702962), or why people are allowed to install
> libc6-amd64 on their amd64 system.
> 
> I therefore wonder if we can add a new value for the Multi-arch: field
> like "forbidden", to prevent a foreign package to be installed on a
> system.
> 
> Otherwise it looks like we'll have to go with a long list of
> Conflicts...

Alternatively, we can create an empty package called for example
multiarch-no-foreign, which is arch:any and Multi-arch: none. That way
all packages which should not be installed as foreign architecture can
depend on this one.

What do you think?

-- 
Aurelien Jarno                          GPG: 4096R/1DDD8C9B
aurelien at aurel32.net                 http://www.aurel32.net