To make a long story short:
The Debian Policy ("arch-os") and reality ("os-arch" for non-Linux
kernel, "arch" for Linux kernel) contradict each other and (at least)
one of them must be fixed.
The facts:
1. The "dpkg-architecture -L" list of all architectures explicitly
mentions all non-Linux operating systems and leaves out the "os"
part in case of Linux. So when there is no OS in the architecture
specification string, Linux is implied:
i386
powerpc
darwin-i386
darwin-powerpc
hurd-i386
hurd-powerpc
2. The Debian Policy says that when specifying an architecture
string somewhere, one "should" use the "arch-os" format.
3. "dpkg-architecture -i" only understands "os-arch", not "arch-os".
Short check: "dpkg-architecture -ii386-linux" fails,
"dpkg-architecture -ilinux-i386"
4. The buildd network works with the same architecture list like
"dpkg-architecture -L", according to Bastian Blank.
To fix the Debian Policy, one would need to change "11.1 Architecture
specification strings" to something like:
If a program needs to specify an architecture specification string
in some place, the following format should be used: "os-arch" for
non-Linux kernels, and "arch" for Linux kernels.
[60] The following architectures and operating systems are currently
recognized by dpkg-architecture. The architecture, "arch", is one
of the following: alpha, arm, hppa, i386, ia64, m68k, mips,
mipsel, powerpc, s390, sh, sheb, sparc and sparc64. The
operating system, "os", is left out in case of Linux, or darwin,
hurd, freebsd, kfreebsd, knetbsd, netbsd and openbsd.
Of course, a few more processor architectures from "dpkg-architecture
-L" would need to be added here as well for completeness' sake.
If one would opt to fix reality, one would have to touch and probably
break a lot of working software, so I would not recommend that based
on the facts known to me.
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