[Pkg-javascript-devel] Bug#725362: Bug#725362: node-bones: present but uninstallable on architectures lacking nodejs

[Colin Watson]

On Sat, Oct 05, 2013 at 01:59:18PM +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> Are you sure the package is really shipped on archs that do not include 
> the interpreter that the _binary_ package depends on, even though 
> _source_ package does not?

I'm sure.

> As also commented in the related bug#725363, I believe it is filtered 
> off by the transition rule for testing, and therefore only is "noisy" in 
> unstable.

Unstable-to-testing migration does not magically filter out some
binaries; entire source packages plus all their binaries migrate at
once.  If there is a problem on one architecture then it blocks the
whole migration, so that would still not be an excuse for disregarding
this bug; problems that prevent migration to testing need to be
addressed.

At present, the two cases of Architecture: any packages shipping
binaries that depend on nodejs are indeed held out of testing *as a
whole source+binaries unit* because of this (and in the case of
node-bones, because of other problems too).  However, a simple look at
http://ftp-master.debian.org/testing/testing_uninst_full.txt
demonstrates that many nodejs-dependent packages are indeed in testing
in an uninstallable state for architectures that do not include the
interpreter in question, due to the IMO misguided decision to make them
Architecture: all despite the interpreter having rather limited
architecture support.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at debian.org]