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

[Jonas Smedegaard]

Quoting Colin Watson (2013-10-05 14:08:26)
> On Sat, Oct 05, 2013 at 01:01:07PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
>> On Sat, Oct 05, 2013 at 01:46:04PM +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
>>> 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.
>> 
>> Sorry, that's factually incorrect.  Architecture: all packages only 
>> have their dependencies checked on i386 - due to essentially this 
>> class of problem whereby many Architecture: all packages in fact mean 
>> "Architecture: some".
>
> Incidentally, I have some data on this which perhaps may convince you 
> if you think it's bad that uninstallable packages currently 
> effectively have to be allowed into testing (as I do).
>
> http://ftp-master.debian.org/testing/testing_uninst.txt shows the
> current number of uninstallable packages in testing if you only check
> Architecture: all dependencies on i386 - very low across the board, as
> you can see - while
> http://ftp-master.debian.org/testing/testing_uninst_full.txt shows the
> current number of uninstallable packages in testing if you check
> Architecture: all dependencies on all architectures.  You can see that
> the numbers are of course much higher.  But how much of this is a
> systemic problem?
>
> Well, if I look at powerpc (the architecture I was considering first),
> then binary packages whose names contain the substring "node" make up
> 118 out of the total count of 201 uninstallables: 59%.  Now, powerpc is
> better off than some other architectures, admittedly; but that still
> means that just fixing all the node packages would make a big dent in
> this problem, and get much closer to what I think should be a sensible
> goal: check Architecture: all dependencies on all architectures, so that
> testing can actually be dependency-clean rather than just
> dependency-clean if you ignore certain kinds of problems.

Thanks. Quite interesting!

Feels to me that it would be better to fix this at its core instead of 
covering over it by use of bogus build-dependency.  I am sure you've 
already considered that option, and would appreciate your elaborating 
more (I saw and tried to follow your conversation on irc, but failed to 
understand it there).

Is there perhaps already a bugreport tracking this flaw of only 
considering i386 for arcch-compatibility?


 - Jonas

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

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