[Pkg-javascript-devel] Bug#725363: Bug#725363: present but uninstallable on architectures lacking nodejs

[Jonas Smedegaard]

Quoting Colin Watson (2013-10-04 19:05:20)
> On Fri, Oct 04, 2013 at 06:47:13PM +0200, Jérémy Lal wrote:
> > The actual problem of these two packages is that they have 
> > Architecture: any whereas they are in fact platform-independent.
> > They should be Architecture: all
> 
> As discussed on IRC, while I agree that this would be an improvement 
> (in that it would hide the problem from dependency analysis tools, 
> which typically have to ignore missing dependencies of Architecture: 
> all packages on non-i386 in order to be at all practical to run), I 
> think it ignores the issue that we should not be presenting 
> uninstallable packages to users.
> 
> Architecture: all packages that contain scripts (as opposed to large 
> data packages) are typically small enough that the small amount of 
> duplication in the archive resulting from making them 
> architecture-dependent is of very little consequence, especially when 
> the effect is presenting a cleaner archive to users invoking their 
> package manager on less-common architectures.

Packages that contains scripts should depend on the interpreter for 
those scripts - as node-xmlhttprequest correctly does.

I don't see how it can clutter package managers for our users (except on 
unstable which arguably are developers/testers, regular users): AIUI 
packages only enter testing when their binary dependencies can be 
satisfied.


 - Jonas

-- 
 * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
 * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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