Bug#794538: systemd / cross-building / failure in dpkg-gencontrol

[Jakub Wilk]

Hi Steve!

* Steve Langasek <vorlon at debian.org>, 2015-08-30, 00:45:
>>No, --arch shouldn't be repurposed to mean "produce a deb that 
>>satisfies cross-build requirements".  If you want to add new 
>>functionality, that's fine.  Just don't break existing functionality 
>>while you're at it.
>>
>>Something like "mk-build-deps --cross --arch $hostarch" would be 
>>acceptable.
>
>What existing functionality does this break?  Using the --arch option 
>to mk-build-deps (with a foreign arch as argument), but not using the 
>result for purposes of cross-building, seems like an entirely 
>theoretical use case to me.

From time to time I use mk-build-deps on my development machine, then 
install the resulting binary in a chroot, which is not necessary of the 
same architecture. I couldn't use mk-build-deps directly in the chroot, 
because there's no devscripts installed there.

If the package had architecture-specific build dependencies, then I 
would have to use -a in this scenario, even though there's no 
cross-building involved.

-- 
Jakub Wilk