• Bug#994120: dpkg: please provide multiarch tuple to maintainer scripts

    From Guillem Jover@1:229/2 to Simon McVittie on Tue May 23 00:20:01 2023
    XPost: linux.debian.bugs.dist
    From: [email protected]

    Hi!

    On Sun, 2021-09-12 at 10:27:15 +0100, Simon McVittie wrote:
    Package: dpkg
    Version: 1.20.9
    Severity: wishlist

    Packages that have a plugin architecture, like glib2.0 and gdk-pixbuf,
    often want to know the multiarch tuple in their maintainer scripts so
    that they can enumerate plugins in a multiarch-qualified directory or
    run multiarch-qualified helper programs.

    At the moment, dpkg provides DPKG_MAINTSCRIPT_PACKAGE and DPKG_MAINTSCRIPT_ARCH in maintainer scripts' enviroment, but packages
    that need to know the multiarch tuple have to generate their maintainer scripts from a template: for example, glib2.0 and gdk-pixbuf have a .postinst.in template containing #MULTIARCH#, which gets substituted by
    the package build.

    It would be simpler for packages in this situation if dpkg provided
    something like DPKG_MAINTSCRIPT_MULTIARCH in the environment.

    Sorry, didn't mention anything at the time because Niels reply seemed
    like a better answer to this problem, that was already supported.

    In any case, while this might be nice to have, it requires pretty much reimplementing parts of dpkg-architecture in C to be usable from
    libdpkg or dpkg itself, because we'd need to map the .deb arch into
    the multiarch triplet, which we should not be hardcoding internally.

    This has crossed my mind doing, and I think I started work in that
    direction, but it has also not seemed a very urgent thing to do TBH.

    Thanks,
    Guillem

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