Bug 330453 - qapt-deb-installer should offer to enable support for foreign architecture if needed
Summary: qapt-deb-installer should offer to enable support for foreign architecture if...
Status: RESOLVED INTENTIONAL
Alias: None
Product: muon
Classification: Applications
Component: qapt-deb-installer (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Platform: Debian testing Linux
: NOR normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Jonathan Thomas
URL:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2014-01-27 00:24 UTC by Francois Gouget
Modified: 2014-12-28 20:42 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

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Description Francois Gouget 2014-01-27 00:24:03 UTC 
On a default 64-bit Debian installation support for 32-bit packages is not enabled, that is 'dpkg --print-foreign-architectures' returns nothing.
So when a user gets a 32-bit package and opens it in qapt-deb-installer the only result is:

   Error: Wrong architecture 'i386'

This then leaves it up to the user to search the web and struggle with the command line to figure out how to enable support for 32-bit packages.

So it would be much better if qapt-deb-installer provided a simple way to do so. This would likely end up running something like 'sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 ; sudo apt-get update' behind the scenes (note that the 'apt-get update' is necessary to get that architecture's list of packages so dependencies can then be resolved).

Reproducible: Always
Comment 1 Harald Sitter 2014-12-28 20:42:45 UTC 
Out of scope unfortunately.

Also, at least one debian developer doesn't fancy having this option either. If it made sense to multiarch then that would be made the default anyway.