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

[Colin Watson]

On Sat, Oct 05, 2013 at 02:53:33PM +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> 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).

I don't think artificial build-dependencies are a particularly
inappropriate fix.

Any change to britney to try to have it promote only architectures that
worked would amount to accepting permanent technical debt in unstable,
which I think is very poor design.  Package maintainers should generally
be trying to avoid dependency breakage in unstable where they can as
well as in testing (or, to put it another way, accepting permanent
dependency breakage in unstable makes it harder to see the wood for the
trees), and by far the simplest way to do this is to fix the packages
rather than blaming the infrastructure for pointing out a real problem.

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

No idea, sorry.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at debian.org]