Automated testing of installability of foreign architecture packages?

[Colin Watson]

On Fri, Nov 09, 2012 at 07:25:14AM -0800, Scott Ritchie wrote:
> wine1.4:i386 is currently not installable on amd64, although
> wine1.4:amd64 is.  I would, however, like it to be, for a person who
> wanted 32 bit only Wine even on a 64 bit host OS.
> 
> 
> It occurred to me that, while Britney is automatically testing
> installability of packages, we may not be testing
> cross-installability like this.
> 
> Shoudl britney be extended in this way, or does down this path lie madness?

At the moment I'm not really keen on complicating this further when
we've only just introduced the system, particularly since I expect this
would be a pretty complex feature to add.  Most of the
multiarch-installability problems were due to builds being out of sync
across architectures, and we should have got rid of that problem in one
fell swoop with proposed-migration, so the situation should already be
quite a lot better in raring than in quantal.

FWIW, the current breakage seems local to wine1.4.  If I drill down far
enough I get:

  # apt-get install wine1.4:i386 wine1.4-i386:i386 libsm6:i386 wine1.4-common:i386 libice6:i386 x11-common:i386
  [...]
  The following packages have unmet dependencies:
   wine1.4-common : Depends: wine1.4 (= 1.4.1-0ubuntu1) but it is not going to be installed

I think that's lack of :any, probably.  However, given that
wine1.4-common is marked as transitional, it seems to me that you could
fix this simply by dropping the dependency on wine1.4-common from
wine1.4-i386 (and probably also from wine1.4-amd64).  Do you agree?

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]