[ubuntu-dev] Bug#725720: gdebi should offer to enable support for foreign architecture if needed

[Francois Gouget]

Package: gdebi
Version: 0.9.1
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

On a default 64-bit Debian installation support for 32-bit packages is not enabled, that is 'dpkg --print-foreign-architectures' returns nothing.
So when a user gets a 32-bit package and opens it in gdebi the only result is:

   Error: Wrong architecture 'i386'

This then leaves it up to the user to search the web and struggle with the command line to figure out how to enable support for 32-bit packages.

So it would be much better if gdebi provided a simple way to do so. This would likely end up running something like 'sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 ; sudo apt-get update' behind the scenes (note that the 'apt-get update' is necessary to get that architecture's list of packages so dependencies can then be resolved).


-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.10-3-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fr_FR.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages gdebi depends on:
ii  gdebi-core        0.9.1
ii  gir1.2-gtk-3.0    3.8.4-1
ii  gir1.2-vte-2.90   1:0.34.8-1
ii  gksu              2.0.2-6
ii  gnome-icon-theme  3.8.3-1
ii  python            2.7.5-5
ii  python-gi         3.8.2-1

Versions of packages gdebi recommends:
ii  libgtk2-perl      2:1.247-2+b1
ii  shared-mime-info  1.0-1+b1

gdebi suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information