Ubuntu
dpkg package

change of *_GNU_{SYSTEM,TYPE} (silently) breaks package builds

Bug #17339 reported by Matthias Klose on 2005-05-21

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	dpkg (Ubuntu)	Invalid	Critical	Scott James Remnant (Canonical)

Bug Description

dpkg-1.13 did change the system from 'linux' to 'linux-gnu'. Many packages
visibly fail, others are silently misconfigured/patched and built. Please revert
this change until Debian switches to the new dpkg version as well. It's no
benefit in the current situation. Affected packages are glibc, gcc, ruby1.8 to
name the already known ones.

Revision history for this message

Matthias Klose (doko) wrote on 2005-05-23:

*** Bug 17376 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Revision history for this message

Scott James Remnant (Canonical) (canonical-scott) wrote on 2005-05-23:

This isn't a dpkg bug. It was a deliberate decision to make these variables
contain the right values; the packages depending on these values not changing
are wrong.

In summary:

DPKG_*_ARCH and DPKG_*_ARCH_* are invariant, decided by Debian.

DPKG_*_GNU_* are variant, decided by GNU and occasionally changed.

debian/rules should use the values of the invariant ARCH variables, DEB_*_ARCH
is "i386" or "freebsd-i386", etc. DEB_*_ARCH_OS is "linux" or "freebsd",
DEB_*_ARCH_CPU is "i386" in both circumstances.

For backward-compatibility, the right change would be to test the value of
DEB_*_ARCH_OS and if that doesn't exist, fall back to using DEB_*_GNU_SYSTEM_TYPE.