[Pkg-haskell-maintainers] Bug#736477: agda-mode: enable multiarch

[Helmut Grohne]

Package: agda-mode
Version: 2.3.2.2-1
Severity: wishlist

Dear Maintainer,

It would be awesome to install 32bit agda on an amd64 base system,
because 32bit agda is significantly faster. Making this possible is a
huge task and fixing this bug will not suffice to make it possible, but
this package also has a small piece of the cake:

The agda-mode package is arch:all and depends on libghc-agda-dev which
is arch:any. Since arch:all packages are treated as native architecture
(amd64 in my case), it currently requires libghc-agda-dev to be native
as well.  Would it be possible to loosen this dependency in a way where
a libghc-agda-dev:i386 suffices for agda-mode when amd64 is the native
architecture?

This depends on several factors. When switching architectures, on has to
pay attention to were architecture boundaries are. agda-mode essentially
depends on three components: emacs, agda-bin and libghc-agda-dev. The
important question here is whether agda-mode needs agda-bin and
libghc-agda-dev to have the same architecture. If that is the case, then
my request is not satisfiable with the current dpkg. In that case,
please outright close this bug, because solving the relevant dpkg
limitation would obsolete this bug. If that architecture matching is not
required, then marking agda-bin and libghc-agda-dev as Multi-Arch:
allowed or even marking agda-bin as Multi-Arch: foreign might be
feasible. Once that has happened, agda-mode can annotate the relevant
dependencies on M-A:allowed packages with :any to solve this bug.

Thanks for considering

Helmut