RFC: Better portability for package maintainers

[Erast Benson]

On Sat, 2006-05-20 at 12:37 -0300, Gustavo Noronha Silva wrote:
> Em Sex, 2006-05-19 às 17:52 -0700, Erast Benson escreveu:
> > is platform independent and just works. And if Debian's meta-information
> > introduces problem for package which compiles and runs just fine from
> > out of upstream tarball on non-glibc ports than maintainer might be
> > interested to fix it, otherwise "Architecture: any" doesn't make much
> > sense in its debian/control file.
> 
> Our Architecture: field is about the arches that Debian itself supports.
> If the meaning was broad as you describe, would we have to make sure our
> packages build on MS DOS?

Sure not. :-)
I was talking about existing Debian architectures which are part of
official dpkg ostable:

linux           linux-gnu       linux[^-]*(-gnu.*)?
darwin          darwin          darwin[^-]*
freebsd         freebsd         freebsd[^-]*
kfreebsd        kfreebsd-gnu    kfreebsd[^-]*(-gnu.*)?
knetbsd         knetbsd-gnu     knetbsd[^-]*(-gnu.*)?
netbsd          netbsd          netbsd[^-]*
openbsd         openbsd         openbsd[^-]*
hurd            gnu             gnu[^-]*

+

solaris         pc-solaris2     solaris.*


> I'll agree with Josselin here: Debian is a GNU operatig system, not a
> POSIX OS. If there are porting problems which are specific to Nexenta
> and you want them to be integrated, you can provide patches. Or you can
> port the GNU libc to Nexenta (and, after this happens, you can even
> integrate Nexenta into Debian, why not?).

Is that a requirement for Debian port (i.e. marked as "supported")? It
is not correlates with what officials were saying in regards of
non-glibc ports half a year ago. Could someone elaborate?

> I do care about Free Software principles, but my time for working on
> Debian is very limited these days, and porting my packages to an
> "unsupported" architecture is not very high in my priorities list.

"supported" and "existing"(unsupported) architectures are still Debian
architectures. But I see your point.

-- 
Erast