Universe Clarification Please

[Brett Kirksey]

After spending a couple of hours of frustration attemtpting to
get gnucash installed, a helpful soul on this list informed me
that they found there was not a gnucash package for ppc. Since
I'm a Linux newbie, I assumed if a package appeared in Synaptic
it was supposed to at least be installable.

I realize that Universe is not officially supported, but I
didn't realize it can contain packages available for one
platform but not another--even though they are both using Ubuntu.
I was attemtpting to install the gnucash-common package which
required gnucash--which couldn't be found. Everyone was telling
me they were installing without a problem. Finally somebody
found that while I could see gnucash-common and gnucash-docs
using Synaptic on Ubuntu ppc, there is no gnucash package for
ppc.

My questions:

Is it normal for universe to contain packages that will only
work on certain platforms? If so, is their anyway to identify
these since they are showing up in Synaptic?

Thanks,
Brett