multiarch policy documentation is ready (Re: Bug#1063605: debian-policy: mandate use of `dpkg-buildflags` for all software compilation on Debian)

Holger Levsen <[email protected]> Wed, 11 Feb 2026 09:14:34 +0000

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.policy
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

hi,

just a minor addition...

On Tue, Feb 10, 2026 at 01:10:50PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> I see this as part of a long trend in Policy maintenance. Originally, in
> part due to its origins in a world that had far fewer tools, Debian Policy
> (by way of the Packaging Manual) was a fairly comprehensive guide to
> everything that went into creating a Debian package from the ground up.
> With only that one document, in theory you could work out how to create a
> valid Debian package from first principles and common UNIX tools.
> 
> Over time, it has stopped being that, for a variety of reasons. One major
> reason is that the tools have both become much better and more universal,
> and the underlying tools have their own documentation. [...]

when I've read that paragraph I was thinking about documenting dgit and/or
tag2upload or really any tool in devref... :) 
- but that wasn't the reason I've started this reply...

> In a world in which Policy is not keeping up with very long-standing
> changes (triggers, multiarch) that we have not found the time to document
> properly [...]

which was this: while it's true that policy hasn't properly been documenting
multiarch since 2014 (sigh..), since 2025 there's is now a patch written
by Jochen, Josch, Helmut & myself in #749826 which has been reviewed by Sean
once and which after addressing those remarks now awaits a another review by
Sean.

So, soon (tm!) multiarch will be documented in policy! \o/

Someone (else) wanting to help could probably review the following three
bugs and forcemerge (or not) them with #749826:

#650974 [debian-policy] Make Policy references to /usr/lib multiarch-aware
#684672 [debian-policy] document multiarch tuple definitions
#687900 [debian-policy] document multiarch

And then, finally, 
https://wiki.debian.org/Multiarch and
https://wiki.debian.org/Multiarch/Implementation should be updated to reflect
that multiarch has finally been documented in debian-policy!

Hooray!

-- 
cheers,
	Holger

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