arch paramater in apt based builds

[Sven Wölfel]

Hi,

I'm working on getting a Debian13 based Image running. Based on the IMage description I had for Debian 12. But I have some issues with the setup of my apt repositories.

My profiles section looks like this:

    <profiles>
        <profile name="Disk" description="Expandable Disk image"/>
        <profile name="hyperv" description="Hyper-V Disk Image" arch="x86_64"/>
        <profile name="kvm" description="KVM Disk Image" arch="x86_64"/>
    </profiles>

when I try to setup a repository with the following:
    <repository type="apt-deb" distribution="trixie" components="main contrib non-free non-free-firmware" alias="lff_sources" repository_gpgcheck="false" imageinclude="true" >
        <source path="http://ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de/debian/"/>
    </repository>

I get the error during the build:

KiwiDebianBootstrapError: KiwiCommandError: apt-get: stderr: E: Package 'apt:arm64' has no installation candidate

So kiwi tries to use the first candidate for apt from the package.list which is apt for arm64. To get rid of this I tried to set arch="amd64" for the repository but then I get the error that apt has no installation candidate. So it seems the repository entry is ignored when arch is set to another value then arch in the profile.

Is there a way to get around this? Or has there been a change as how arch for apt repositories is handled by kiwi?

For Debian 12 it was and is not necessary to specify the target architecture for the repository part. 

Any ideas?

[Marcus Schäfer]

Hi,

> KiwiDebianBootstrapError: KiwiCommandError: apt-get: stderr: E: Package
> 'apt:arm64' has no installation candidate

Yes this is because apt for some reason cannot handle multi-arch
repos build by the buildservice. I have added two arch distinct
repos providing the builder here:

https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Virtualization:/Appliances:/Builder/Debian_13_x86_64/
https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Virtualization:/Appliances:/Builder/Debian_13_aarch64/

This is how we solved it for Debian 12. If you are using the above
repos apt did not complain

Hope this helps

Regards,
Marcus
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[Sven Woelfel]

Yes this helps a lot.

Thank you as always!

I don't really get it either since the regular debian repositories look
similar except for the additional distribution hierarchy.