Remaining broken deps (Re: rawhide report: 20080417 changes)

[Michael Schwendt]

On Thu, 17 Apr 2008 17:18:52 -0400, Jesse Keating wrote:

> I just hate "noarch" packages which clearly have arch
> specific requirements.

Of course. We've been there before.

But it's not trivial to fix, unless the policy becomes "noarch packages
MUST NOT depend on arch-specific packages, not automatically and not
explicitly either". Mind you, even script packages require some
interpreter (e.g. /bin/sh), and that only works fine as long as the
interpreter is available for all archs.

If -- at the time of writing a noarch spec -- there is any sort of
dependency on an arch-specific package (e.g. for executables), that should
be reason enough to make the noarch package arch-specific instead. But
later one, dependencies may change, and with that comes the desire to
switch between arch-specific and noarch or vice versa. That's never
good if it's done to be able to use ExcludeArch/ExclusiveArch.