Bug#995162: cannot install together with i386

[Mattia Rizzolo]

On Thu, Sep 30, 2021 at 09:27:50PM +0200, Giovanni Mascellani wrote:
> Thanks for the info. Unless I am mistaken, this means that any package which
> installs a shared PNG breaks at every binNMU, unless the binNMU is for all
> architectures. Wouldn't it be better if dh_strip_nondeterminism used the
> last sourceful upload as reference timestamp? Was this option considered?

It has been considered, but I can tell you that it's _much_ more complex
than just that.  For starters, there would be a huge layer violation in
doing so: the timestamp to use in the normalization comes from dpkg.
Also, normalizing to the previous sourceful upload date is quite likely
to resurface other bugs such what https://bugs.debian.org/843773 tried to fix.

I can add that there are quite many other packages affected by this
(currently 58 binaries), and regularly they cycle as they are binNMUed
and then re-uploaded.  Fortunately this pretty much only affects -dev
and some perl-* packages, and not many people try to cross-coinstall
those packages (as opposed to pure libraries), so the bug doesn't
resurface too often.

I'll leave with the relevant "toolchain" bug: https://bugs.debian.org/969501
(which is what I consider a very valid technical non-full solution of
the problem), and what realistically is the one final solution:
https://bugs.debian.org/894441

Realistically, package-wise, I think they would good by not placing PNGs
in arch:any packages, that would side-step this issue.  And it's the
proper thing to do anyway so why not.  More than that, I don't think
they should bother excessively unless somebody reports them.

-- 
regards,
                        Mattia Rizzolo

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