[Pkg-ime-devel] Bug#651488: Bug#651488: support Multi-Arch

[Kees Cook]

Hi Osamu,

On Fri, Dec 09, 2011 at 11:45:28PM +0900, Osamu Aoki wrote:
> Thanks for the patch.  Before uploading package with your patch, I have
> few things which I like you to help me.

Sure!

> I am still not clear on how to make package for full Multi-Arch support.

The main guide for this is here:
http://wiki.debian.org/Multiarch/Implementation

Fundamentally, packages that provide shared libraries need to be
co-installable. For packages that provide non-system shared libraries
("plugins"), things get a little bit more complex. In ibus's case, it's a
provider of plugins, rather than a consumer, so its job is easier (it just
needs to put plugins into the locations that the plugin consumer is
expecting it -- hence the changes for the gtk and gtk2 libdir).

> This is serious redoing of autotools thingy.  Great.

Yeah, I think that patch probably needs to go upstream. It's really a bug
that they were using libdir instead of pkglibdir.

> #Q1:
> 
> I am wondering about
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=558568
> This requests autoreconf.
> Does this patch address to fix this bug too?

This is not fixed as far as I know. The changes made for multi-arch were
just to swap pkglibdir for libdir, and doesn't need do any autoreconf
calls.

> #Q2:
> Where is the howto for all these complicated packaging tricks.

Mentioned above, http://wiki.debian.org/Multiarch/Implementation
As for the Makefile changes, that comes from my experience with automake
and the various targets. For more details on the file location details, see
http://sourceware.org/autobook/autobook/autobook_106.html

> #Q3 do we need to hardcode exact $DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH as below.  What is
> the negative of just using * for those location as below?

The problem comes when multiple architectures are installed on the system,
or potentially, only the non-native version is installed. In which case "*"
would match it, but not actually be available. Since the xinput.d script
runs only for the native system, it needs to examine its environment from
only the native library perspective. At least that is my understanding of
the logic in that script.

Thanks!

-Kees

-- 
Kees Cook                                            @debian.org