[Pkg-javascript-devel] Bug#725363: present but uninstallable on architectures lacking nodejs

[Colin Watson]

On Fri, Oct 04, 2013 at 06:47:13PM +0200, Jérémy Lal wrote:
> The actual problem of these two packages is that they have
> Architecture: any
> whereas they are in fact platform-independent.
> They should be Architecture: all

As discussed on IRC, while I agree that this would be an improvement (in
that it would hide the problem from dependency analysis tools, which
typically have to ignore missing dependencies of Architecture: all
packages on non-i386 in order to be at all practical to run), I think it
ignores the issue that we should not be presenting uninstallable
packages to users.

Architecture: all packages that contain scripts (as opposed to large
data packages) are typically small enough that the small amount of
duplication in the archive resulting from making them
architecture-dependent is of very little consequence, especially when
the effect is presenting a cleaner archive to users invoking their
package manager on less-common architectures.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at debian.org]