[Debian-med-packaging] Question about proper archive area for packages that require big data for operation

[Ben Hutchings]

On Sat, 2013-04-27 at 10:13 +0200, Laszlo Kajan wrote:
> Dear Ben!
> 
> On 27/04/13 00:46, Ben Hutchings wrote:
[...]
> > However, I would expect the vast majority of installations to be on
> > amd64, so if you always generate a 64-bit little-endian database
> > and avoid duplicating when installing on such a machine then it
> > would be better for most users (not so nice for others).
> > 
> > (Incidentally, arch:all packages generating arch-specific data have
> > interesting interactions with multi-arch.  I doubt many people with
> > multi-arch systems would want this package to generate multiple
> > versions of the database, but you never know...)
> 
> I see. According to [1], Arch:all with Multi-Arch:same is an error.
> [1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MultiarchSpec
>
> So at this point I see one way forward:
> 
> 1: Move the postinst script into a new Arch:any package that depends on 'metastudent-data'. This Arch:any package would build the native
> database in postinst (with no multiarch support for now).
> 
> What do you think?

This might work, but be careful.  Consider a multiarch system with armhf
as primary and armel as additional architecture.  Both architectures are
little-endian, 32-bit.  If you install metastudent-data-native/armel and
metastudent-data-native/armhf, they should only generate one native copy
of the data (right?).  But if you remove one and leave the other, the
native copy should stay.

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings
Knowledge is power.  France is bacon.
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