[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#1042981: Multiarch pitfall: polkitd fails to start if not installed in native architecture

[Bertram Felgenhauer]

Luca Boccassi wrote:
[...]
> I don't think this is something we should facilitate by default or
> spend any energy on.
>
> You can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see any good reason why
> anybody would need to run a polkitd:i386 on an otherwise amd64 system.
> It's not what happens by default if you have i386 enabled and you type
> 'apt install polkitd' or so.

I agree that there isn't a good reason, and I'm not sure how I ended
up in that situation in the first place (the log files don't go back
far enough). One thing I do know is that polkitd:i386 was marked as
automatically installed, so I almost certainly did not make that
decision deliberately.

My speculation is that this happened while satisfying dependencies for
a third party i386 application. That meant installing required 32 bit
libraries, and one of them must have come with a polkitd dependency,
and the i386 version was selected because I was installing an i386
package.

Anyway, I reported this because I assumed that pinning packages to the
native architecture was easy, so it would be justified even for this
(hopefully!) rare scenario... apparently that's not the case.

Cheers,

Bertram