[debhelper-devel] Bug#805776: debhelper: Please stop expanding misc:Pre-Depends to include multiarch-support

[Wookey]

Package: debhelper
Version: 9.20120909
Severity: minor

For the squeeze->wheezy transition it was necessary for M-A:same
packages to pre-depend on multiarch-support in order to ensure that a
new-enough libc was installed first during the upgrade.

This need is now long past and the issue could only affect people
upgrading from squeeze to stretch, which isn't supported and in
practice still would't be an issue as plenty of packages now have the
pre-depends.

So, as part of unwinding this transitional measure debhelper should
stop adding it to packages.

The instructions for packagers have been changed to stop telling them
to add this.

Nothing is broken by the current state, but we are generally bad at
tidying up cruft like this so we tend to accumulate it.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 7.9
  APT prefers oldstable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'oldstable-updates'), (500, 'oldstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages debhelper depends on:
ii  binutils    2.22-8+deb7u2
ii  dpkg        1.16.16
ii  dpkg-dev    1.16.16
ii  file        5.11-2+deb7u8
ii  html2text   1.3.2a-15
ii  man-db      2.6.2-1
ii  perl        5.14.2-21+deb7u2
ii  po-debconf  1.0.16+nmu2

debhelper recommends no packages.

Versions of packages debhelper suggests:
pn  dh-make  <none>

-- no debconf information