Dear ftpmasters,

The latest upload of lintian, 2.5.0~rc3, adds a new
'missing-pre-dependency-on-multiarch-support' tag to warn about improper use
of multiarch directories. If a package ships a shared library in a
multiarch library directory (/usr/lib/<triplet>), but does not pre-depend on
'multiarch-support', this is an error, as discussed here:

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2011/04/msg00036.html

Since we can say with a high degree of confidence that failing to include
this pre-depends will (on i386) cause problems on partial upgrades from
squeeze, and could even break dist-upgrades entirely, I think it's best if
this lintian check be treated as a non-overridable autoreject.

In the short term, this would be a fatal error for three packages already in
the archive, hwloc, liblouis, and liblouisxml, because these packages
install their libraries already to the "draft" multiarch directories that
were supported in squeeze (same as the final directories on all archs except
for *-i386). And if these packages were to depend on multiarch-support
today, they would be uninstallable since eglibc has not yet included this
package in an upload. So it is perhaps best to wait until eglibc is
transitioned and the maintainer has had a chance to fix these three packages
before turning such a check on.

Thanks,
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org