Subject: Bug#954138: Should not download indexes for architectures that are not enabled

From: Wouter Verhelst <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2020 11:21:57 +0100

On Tue, Mar 17, 2020 at 04:39:58PM +0100, David Kalnischkies wrote:
> It is possible that I completely misunderstood you though as I basically
> ignored your first example (and bugtitle) as it makes no sense to me and

Yes, sorry; I guess my mind got a better handle on what I was trying to
say as I was writing the message, and then forgot to update the earlier
messages.

> focused on the later examples… Why should someone configure a list of
> architectures in sources.list they do not want to be downloaded? That is
> like the freaking point of configuring the list in sources.list compared
> to just letting apt decide which architectures to download (based on
> what dpkg could process by default).

The problem is that apt will produce warning messages if the list of
architecture indexes it tries to download from a repository is not a
strict subset of the list of available architectures at that repository.

If I say "dpkg --add-architecture riscv64", then apt will try to
download riscv64 indexes from *all* my configured repositories,
including those that do not carry riscv64, and produce a warning message
for those that do not carry it. The only way to stop apt from issuing
those warnings (that I can see) is to add explicit configuration for
those repositories to list the architectures that it does support.

I try to do that with extrepo[1], as I think it is bad form to write
configuration files that will produce warning messages. However, the
result is now that I create configuration files which may say things
like "Architectures: i386 amd64 ppc64el" even on systems which do not
have one or more of those architectures enabled as foreign
architectures. While this will not produce warning messages, it does
result in a waste of bandwidth.

I guess what I want is for a way to avoid the warning messages? "Yes,
apt, these architectures are not expected to be there, leave that as is
now, kthxbye".

[1] https://packages.debian.org/extrepo

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