Wouter Verhelst wrote: >> magicdev | g-v-m [!powerpc], g-v-m | magicdev [powerpc] allowed ? > > It is for build-depends, but not for plain depends. If you need that, > you need to generate your depends header at build time, and need > arch:any packages instead of arch:all ones (which isn't impossible, > although quite ugly).
It seems to me that you might be able to use type-handling in this situation. Having in the Depends the following, in order: type-handling magicdev | g-v-m | powerpc-linux-gnu g-v-m | magicdev | not+powerpc should (not tested!) do what you want and allow you to keep the metapackages Arch: all. Once type-handling is installed, on powerpc the second dependency is satisfied (type-handling Provides powerpc-linux-gnu), so apt should look at only the third dependency; on non-powerpc, the third dependency is satisfied (type-handling provides not+powerpc), so apt should look at only the second dependency. Whether this works in practice, I don't know, because it requires that apt is smart enough to know what type-handling Provides before looking at the second and third dependencies. Might be worth trying, though. The other downside is of course that type-handling depends on dpkg-dev, which recommends c-compiler, so many apt front ends will cause gcc to be installed. IMO this is really a flaw in the type-handling package, and a dummy package that Provides appropriate per-arch virtual packages should be split off from it. regards, -- Kevin B. McCarty <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Physics Department WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/ Princeton University GPG public key ID: 4F83C751 Princeton, NJ 08544
