Comment 6 for bug 731079

On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 03:48:06PM -0000, Wookey wrote:
> So the real problem here is that xdeb thought libidn11-java was a
> crossable package, downloaded it and tried to cross it. The question is
> should we fix this by telling xdeb that it's not meaningfully crossable,
> or by having it automatically skip over such failures and press on in
> the hope that it won't matter?

I don't think we want to do the latter. I was thinking more in terms of
trapping the error, taking dpkg-cross's advice that this is not a crossable
package, and rerunning the dpkg-cross with that package both excluded from
the crossing list and added to the list of dependency exclusions.

> On the one hand the way xdeb works it expects to be able to identify
> crossable packages from it's heuristics+black/whitelists - doing this
> lets it remove them from the cross-dependency tree in the -cross
> packages. On the other hand otherwise-identified, but actually cross-
> null packages are harmless. If we decided that such packages were not an
> error, then we'd need to turn on the '--convert-anyway' flag so that the
> empty packages were there to satisfy the dependencies on them which have
> not been pruned. (this is how xapt works - just do the whole damn lot).

Right, force-crossing the packages might also be ok. I'm pretty sure the
one thing we *don't* want to do is to just ignore the xdeb non-zero exit,
since that could mean some of the -cross packages that *have* been generated
will be uninstallable due to non-existent deps.

Given the choice between force-crossing empty packages, and trapping and
re-crossing a reduced list of binaries, I have no opinion. The former would
be easier to implement; do you see any significant reason not to do this?

> Apart from polluting the package name space with a lot of -cross
> packages it doesn't do much harm, but is best discouraged outside a
> chroot becuase it'll make a mess eventually.

Right; I wouldn't expect xdeb to be run outside a dedicated development
environment anyway.

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