Bug#771058: python-debian: please add an implementation for Debian architecture wildcard matching

[Colin Watson]

On Wed, Mar 29, 2017 at 05:53:59PM +0200, Johannes Schauer wrote:
> since I reported the bug in 2014 I long left github for my own self-hosted
> solution. The up-to-date version of the code can be found here:
> 
> https://gitlab.mister-muffin.de/josch/debarchwildcardtest
> 
> In contrast to the older version on github, this version:
> 
>  - generate 17591105 test cases instead of just 106692 (all possible
>    architecture wildcard permutations) to make sure that the implementation is
>    compliant with the one from dpkg
>  - pep8 compliance
>  - support for the new debtuples

I see that the daklib implementation had triplettable compatibility, but
this one doesn't.  I don't suppose it would be possible to restore that
to debarch.py?

The reason I ask is that we'd like to be able to use this in Launchpad,
probably for somewhat similar reasons as dak; at the moment we're
forking dpkg-architecture, but that's prohibitively slow in some cases
where we need to perform lots of matches
(https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/1062638).  However, Launchpad
is currently deployed on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS which has triplettable rather
than tupletable, and that isn't likely to change for some time.
Deploying a backport of python-debian (or perhaps even a temporary copy
of this code) is doable; deploying a dpkg backport decidedly isn't.

If you want a patch for this, I can certainly try, but I thought I'd ask
first in case it was a simple matter of reverting a simplification patch
or something.

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at debian.org]