hurd: Explain the classical arch:all version incoherency issue

1 files changed, 23 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/english/ports/hurd/hurd-devel-debian.wml b/english/ports/hurd/hurd-devel-debian.wml
index 75bf2459e43..d4ca9e9fa6f 100644
--- a/english/ports/hurd/hurd-devel-debian.wml
+++ b/english/ports/hurd/hurd-devel-debian.wml
@@ -128,6 +128,29 @@ has some fix already, which just needs to be extended to hurd-i386.</p>
 
 <ul>
 <li>
+<code>foo : Depends: foo-data (= 1.2.3-1) but it is not going to be installed</code>
+<p>
+The short answer is: package <code>foo</code> failed to build on hurd-i386,
+and that needs to be fixed, look at the build failure on its buildd.debian.org
+status page.
+</p>
+<p>
+This typically happens when package <code>foo</code> currently fails to build,
+but used to build fine before. Use <code>apt-cache policy foo foo-data</code>
+to see that for instance version <code>1.2.3-1</code> of <code>foo</code> is
+available, and a newer <code>foo-data</code> version <code>2.0-1</code> is
+available. This is because on debian-ports, architecture-independent (arch:all)
+packages are shared among all architectures, and thus when a newer version
+of the <code>foo</code> source package (which builds the <code>foo</code>
+and <code>foo-data</code> binary packages) is uploaded, the newer arch:all
+<code>foo-data</code> package gets installed, even if the newer hurd-i386
+<code>foo</code> binary package cannot be built, thus leading to incompatible
+versions. Fixing that requires making the debian-ports archive use dak instead
+of mini-dak, which is still ongoing work.
+</p>
+
+</li>
+<li>
 <code>some symbols or patterns disappeared in the symbols file</code>
 <p>
 Some packages maintain a list of the symbols that are expected to appear in