multi-arch and non-multi-arch gobject introspection in Debian and derivatives

[Mike Gabriel]

Hi Colin,

On  Mi 26 Nov 2014 11:31:24 CET, Colin Watson wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 10:11:02AM +0000, Mike Gabriel wrote:
>> At the moment all gir1.2-* packages in Debian must have multi-arch paths for
>> the .typelibs files that provide information for gobject introspection.
>>
>> In Ubuntu and possibly other derivatives, this step has not been taken yet,
>> .typelibs files are installed to non-multi-arch locations.
>>
>> This makes it quite difficult for downstream maintainers (Ubuntu et al.) to
>> simply pull over src:packages that provide some gir1.2-* bin:package.
>
> Ubuntu really wants to have this feature (and indeed did some of the
> work for it); the only reason it wasn't in Ubuntu 14.10 was release
> management concerns.  The current Ubuntu development series has
> multiarch typelibs, so this is no longer an issue for Ubuntu.
>
> I don't think it's worth complicating packages for this.  I would expect
> derivatives to either move forward with gobject-introspection or hold
> back (or trivially patch) packages that install typelibs.
>
>> My proposal for the interim phase (however long that might be) is to provide
>> symlinks in gir1.2-* packages that provide correct functionalities in Debian
>> and downstream distros (such as described above), as well.
>>
>> /usr/lib/girepository-1.0/Caja-2.0.typelib
>> -> /usr/lib/<triplet>/girepository-1.0/Caja-2.0.typelib
>>
>> This surely wouldn't be something worth a freeze exception (I guess), but
>> once we have jessie in place, is this something others would consider, as
>> well?
>
> Certainly by the time jessie is out this should be a rapidly diminishing
> concern; and adding those symlinks stands a good chance of breaking the
> very use cases that multiarch gir1.2-* was trying to fix, because you'd
> no longer be able to coinstall gir1.2-* from different architectures.
> Please don't.
>
> Cheers,

Thanks for your feedback on this and information on the gir1.2-* work  
being done for Ubuntu 15.04.

I agree with you that we should not do such interim hacks, now that it  
is clear that this issue is merely a backporting issue.

Greets,
Mike

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