2012.11.06 - debian/multiarch

for last few months, each time i run apt-get dist-upgrade on my debian/testing i got eagle package uninstalled. it appeared that eagle-data is newer than eagle, thus installation was not possible. i use adm64, but noticed that eagle package does exist for i386. ok - after all this is testing – shit can happen occasionally. due to chronic lack of time i did not went into this problem any deeper and simply used to reinstall previous version of eagle, after the system update. but recently i got annoyed – why is this still not fixed after such a long time?! well – it appeared it is…

the story starts around the beginning of this year, when debian introduced multiarch, in the experimental distrio. soon this change made it to the testing as well. and this is where the funny thing starts. eagle is now provided for i386 only! in order to install it you need to add i386 to your list of the supported architectures and then install eagle, update your packages list and explicitly specifying you want the i386 version:

dpkg --add-architecture i386
apt-get update
apt-get install eagle:i386

does not look so scary, but is not as intuitive, as one could expect, too…