[Popcon-developers] Bug#660712: popularity-contest broken with Multi-Arsch

[Raphael Hertzog]

On Tue, 03 Apr 2012, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
> Forgive my ignorance: could you explain the rationale for the choice
> that was made for the meaning of "dpkg-query -L <package>" when
> <package> is multiarch:same?

The choice was not made for "dpkg -L" only, it was made in general for
all the package names that dpkg takes as input. And no I won't redo the
discussion, feel free to look back at the discussion of last december
IIRC.

But in the specific case of "dpkg -L", I can give you an example of why
it's a bad idea. You can have multiple arguments and each argument gives
a block of files: "dpkg -L foo bar baz" should give out 3 blocks, but
if "bar" is M-A: same with 2 arches, you get back 5 blocks and you can't
be sure of the mapping between packages and files (and in fact that's what
popcon does IIRC).

(Unless of course you wanted to merge the 2 blocks for bar, but then we're
needlessly complicating the code to create a fake view that doesn't match
dpkg's own view of the system)

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer

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