Bug#555981: debian-policy: No clear discussion of arch-independent vs. arch-dependent packages
Russ Allbery
Version: 3.8.3.0
Severity: wishlist
I again may be missing something, but I don't believe there's anywhere in
Policy that says the obvious things about architecture-independent packages
versus architecture-dependent packages. I'm thinking of the basic
definitional things like:
Architecture-independent packages are packages that will function on any
architecture supported by Debian. They generally should not contain any
compiled binaries, since these would be specific to a particular
architecture. Programs that must be compiled for each architecture
must be distributed in separate architecture-dependent packages for each
architecture, not as one architecture-independent package containing all
the binaries.
I know this is obvious stuff, but right now there's no Policy paragraph for
Lintian checks like arch-independent-package-contains-binary-or-object to
reference.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.30-2-686-bigmem (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
debian-policy depends on no packages.
debian-policy recommends no packages.
Versions of packages debian-policy suggests:
ii doc-base 0.9.5 utilities to manage online documen
-- no debconf information
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Cyril Brulebois
> Architecture-independent packages are packages that will function on
> any architecture supported by Debian.
While I can think of plenty of Perl packages where it's about
“functioning”, there are also a lot of data packages around, so I'm
not sure “function” is the best term here.
> They generally should not contain any compiled binaries, since these
> would be specific to a particular architecture.
There could be architecture-specific headers, paths, config files
maybe, etc. Maybe prepend that with “In particular,”?
> Programs that must be compiled for each architecture must be
> distributed in separate architecture-dependent packages for each
> architecture, not as one architecture-independent package containing
> all the binaries.
Heh, never thought of that. :))
Mraw,
KiBi.