Regarding MultiArch support for LibQApt/Muon

[Harald Sitter]

On Friday 26 August 2011 00:40:47 Jonathan Thomas wrote:
> I would very much like to hear anyone's ideas on both the plan for
> going forward as well as opinions on the technical solutions for
> providing multiarch support. I've CC'd both slangasek and mvo so that
> they can bring their multiarch experience to the discussion.

We just had a chat about this on IRC.

Summary:
- changing the name() functions does not make sense
- the arch is a property of the package, not the name, so a new arch() 
function must be introduced for the QApt's Package class
- to indicate the availability of multiarch a new function isMultiArch() or 
somesuch is necessary
- the muon UI (that is the package manager incarnation) in 11.10 will simply 
display the host arch package, except for when there is none in which case it 
will use the available one (e.g. for flashplugin-download which is only i386)
- same goes for the muon software center
- to achieve this either libqapt throws all packages (all arches) at muon, and 
muon then gets to filter the sane ones out OR libqapt implements above 
mentioned policy directly (advantage of latter is that the API consumers do 
not need changes)
- In the long term more flexible behavior is definitely desired, and a somewhat 
sane algorithm is outlined (unfortunately n*n for strcmp reasons to implement 
filtering).

For more background info please check the #kubuntu-devel irc log from around 
22 UTC.

regards,
Harald