Comment 6 for bug 750585

Thanks for the review, Martin.

On Tue, Apr 05, 2011 at 09:00:25PM -0000, Martin Pitt wrote:
> Out of interest, why is it necessary to have co-installable -dev
> packages? Is that only for convenience, to avoid having e. g. a i386
> pbuilder/build chroot on amd64? So far I thought that multiarch was
> pretty much a runtime-only thing.

In the grand scheme of things: because when cross-compiling, you may have to
build part of your package for both the host and build architectures as part
of a single package build. Various packages will build tools which they
then execute as part of the build. In some cases, this means having both
host and build versions of the build dependency installed. That's *very*
frequently the case for libc-dev.

Sorry to mislead you into thinking multiarch was runtime only. That was the
scope of <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MultiarchSpec>, but that's only one piece
of the puzzle (the core around which everything else gets built). In the
long term, I have my sights set much higher. :)

> For limiting the breakage, would it be reasonable to ship a
> /usr/include/asm symlink which points to the "main" architecture? Or
> would that hide potential bugs too much?

Where do you point the symlink, and what package do you include it in? You
can't have each linux-libc-dev package shipping this symlink with a
different target, that breaks co-installability.

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