On Sun, 9 Aug 2020 at 19:01, Adrian Bunk <b...@debian.org> wrote: > The number of tools parsing build dependencies or doing dependency > resolution is larger than you might expect.
Yeah, I can only imagine. And they're not all in one great big git repo either! That's one reason I thought pushing it into the architecture field might make sense: code dealing with architectures has at least some abstraction already, because architectures are a moving target, and are also a bit complicated. In this case, you could put a clause into "dpkg-architecture --equal" to make an architecture of "has-foo" just check (using the right API) if "apt policy foo" has a candidate, and catch a significant fraction of the cases. Re the "chicken no longer exists, use chicken-bin" bit-rot issue, lintian could raise a flag for a [has-foo] arch when foo doesn't exist in the target distribution on any architecture. We already have that issue for binary packages with "Recommends:" and "Suggests:".
