X11 development packages not multiarch in 12.04

[Michael Thayer]

I need to build certain X11 software for an i386 target on my amd64 box. The following packages do not support multi-arch installation:

libice-dev libsm-dev libxext-dev libxmu-dev libxrandr-dev libxrender-dev libxt-dev

However, a quick check after installing the i386 versions in a virtual machine and doing a diff against the host files showed that the only differences between the files in the i386 and amd64 versions are in html files, so presumably it is safe to allow a multi-arch install for them. I hope those were the only ones I am missing!

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

even html files have to match between architectures in order for the packages to be coinstallable. Either the html needs to be generated in a reproducible fashion, or it needs to be moved to a separate package.

[Michael (michaeljt)]

A quick look suggests that the differences are autogenerated id tags. E.g.

@@ -496,7 +496,7 @@
 connections between two clients for the same protocol.</p><p>Any authentication requirements are handled internally by the ICE library.
 The method by which the authentication data is obtained
 is implementation-dependent.
- ^{[<a id="idp17599560" href="#ftn.idp17599560" class="footnote">1</a>]} </p><p>After
+ ^{[<a id="idp5166208" href="#ftn.idp5166208" class="footnote">1</a>]} </p><p>After
 <code class="function">IceOpenConnection</code>
 is called, the client is ready to send a
 <code class="function">ProtocolSetup</code>
@@ -809,7 +809,7 @@

[Michael (michaeljt)]

Looking at the output of debuild on the libice source package, those .html files seem to be generated. A random test of one such tag showed that it differed on successive runs of debuild.

[asiga (asiganael)]

I believe this bug is affecting me, and it prevents me from compiling for 32bit+64bit on Precise Pangolin. My issue is the "libxt-dev" and the "libxt-dev:i386" packages are incompatible, so I cannot install both at the same time. The same happens with "libxp-dev" and "libxp-dev:i386".

This incompatibility didn't happen in the past. I was able to install support for compiling for 32bit and 64bit on Maverick Meerkat, with no problems, and it worked fine.

I need to compile for 32bit and 64bit... is there some workaround available?

Can I force install these incompatible packages, or is there some risk of breaking anything? What would you recommend me to do? Is it my best bet downgrading to Maverick? Thanks!

[Michael (michaeljt)]

On Quantal all of these packages are marked Multi-Arch: same except libxrandr-dev. A quick look in the .deb files show that the MD5 sums of all shared files are the same between i386, amd64, powerpc and both arms. Could you please fix this?

[Michael (michaeljt)]

See also < http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=678895 >.

[Victor Luchits (vluchits)]

Please, could the bug be fixed in time for the 13.10 release? As far as I can see the fix is pretty trivial and with the bug unresolved, we still can not cross compile for i386.

[Victor Luchits (vluchits)]

Just tried nightly build of 13.10, attempt to install libxrandr-dev:i386 prompts for removal of libxrandr-dev.