Bug#881890: gnome-doc-utils: Please mark the package as Multi-Arch foreign

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Dear maintainers,

2017-11-16 03:32 Guillem Jover:
>Package: gnome-doc-utils
>Version: 0.20.10-1
>Severity: wishlist
>X-Debbugs-Cc: Helmut Grohne <helmut at subdivi.de>
>
>Hi!
>
>Helmut mentioned that shadow cannot be bootstrapped because it
>build-depends on gnome-doc-utils, which cannot be satisfied when
>cross-building. And that because supposedly this package is being phased
>out or is being deprecated upstream, that you might not be enthused
>about making many changes to it.
>
>I tried then to switch shadow to use a pure gettext solution (see #881889),
>which revelaed that its XML support is not mature enough. Neither is
>the one in itstool, apparently. :( Which would indicate to me also
>that deprecating this project might seem premature?
>
>So at this point I think the easiest way forward is to do this simple
>change here (i.e. add a «Multi-Arch: foreign» field), which seems pretty
>safe to me.

For all the reasons that Guillem mentions, and that there was no upload
for 5.5 years, with some bugs unreplied and some with patches attached
not applied, it looks likely that the maintainers will not fix this in a
reasonable time frame.

On the other hand, "shadow" is quite important to have cross-built and
it helps when bootstrapping architectures, as it's an essential package.

So I am planning to NMU this package with that change soon, if nobody
beats me to it, and unless the maintainers don't want me to.


Cheers.
-- 
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo at gmail.com>