Re: Bug#1132656: debian-policy: [multiarch] Please document dependency architecture qualifiers: foo:any, bar:native, baz:i386

Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues <[email protected]> Sat, 04 Apr 2026 13:12:10 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.apt.devel,gmane.linux.debian.devel.dpkg.general
Message-ID	<177530113032.6415.15273007144684914094@localhost>

Hi,

Quoting Simon McVittie (2026-04-04 12:08:54)
> dpkg documents architecture qualifiers in its man pages, which could be 
> used as a basis for this.
> 
> deb-control(5) documents this for binary packages' dependency fields 
> (Depends, Recommends etc.): a "real Debian architecture name" can appear 
> after the colon, and as a special case, foo:any is also allowed. I'm not 
> 100% sure what "real" means in this context: probably the intention is 
> that a specific, concrete architecture name like foo:i386 is considered 
> to be "real", but a wildcard like foo:any-i386 or foo:linux-any is not?
> 
> deb-src-control(5) documents the same architecture qualifiers for 
> Build-Depends etc. as for Depends, plus a second special case, 
> foo:native, which is described as "will match the current build 
> architecture if the package is not marked with Multi-Arch: foreign." I'm 
> not 100% sure whether this means that a B-D on something like 
> bash:native will be treated as an unsatisfiable build-dependency in the 
> case where bash *is* M-A: foreign (as in fact it is), or whether a B-D 
> on bash:native is merely equivalent to a B-D on bash in that case. I 
> would hope it's the latter - that seems like it would have more useful 
> semantics, especially when packages were not initially marked 
> Multi-Arch: foreign but could/should have been.

another source of existing documentation of this can be found here:

https://git.hadrons.org/cgit/debian/dpkg/dpkg.git/tree/doc/spec/multiarch.txt?h=pu/doc-multiarch-spec

Especially the tables have been useful references for me in the past and they
essentially mirror the original Ubuntu documentation of this:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MultiarchCross#Build_Dependencies

Thanks!

cheers, josch

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