Source: tclcl User: [email protected] Usertags: rebootstrap Control: affects -1 + src:nam
nam fails to cross build from source, because it fails running tcl2c++ with an "Exec format error". Usually, this indicates that tclcl should be marked Multi-Arch: foreign. Being a package whose main interface is two programs, that actually makes sense. Still the question of whether such a marking is correct is nontrivial to answer. To answer it, one needs both a good understanding of multiarch and package specific knowledge. Most developers lack either. I for one have little clue about tclcl. In my experience, this issue can be solved by having some multiarch person (e.g. me) discuss the matter with a package maintainer. I thus ask you to help me understand the correctness of the marking. When considering the marking, one has to think about the interface that tclcl provides to other packages. What can others expect by depending on tclcl? For instance, Debian policy 12.3 requires that the functionality of packages does not depend on /usr/share/doc being present. Thus anything in that subtree does not contribute to the interface (or it violates the Debian policy). In this case, the interface likely consists of the prorgams tcl2c++ and otcldoc. The question to ask is whether their behaviour depends on the architecture they are being run on. For packages that transform files, this includes the file formats being consumed or produced. For instance, running gcc on armhf produces different object code than running it on amd64. Thus gcc cannot be marked Multi-Arch: foreign. Often we can quickly say that the formats produced or consumed are text formats and thus architecture independent. Still they can contain multiarch paths (e.g. /usr/lib/<triplet>) or the tool can look up files on architecture-dependent paths. For instance, GNU make looks up dependencies of a target in the form "-lfoo" in the library search path. For this reason, make is not Multi-Arch: foreign. Can you help me understand whether the interface of tclcl is architecture-dependent? Thanks for your help Helmut
