Debian Unstable: How to install this i386 package under AMD64 using multiarch

debianlinuxpackage-management

I am currently running Debian unstable (sid) on a AMD64 platform. I have previously enabled multiarch by:

dpkg --add-architecture i386

…and successfully installed some i386 packages, including Wine.

However, when I try:

apt-get install libwine-print

…I get the following error message:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 libwine-print:i386 : Depends: libcups2:i386 (>= 1.4.0) but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

I think I've managed to track it down to a problem with the package libgssapi-krb5-2. It looks like there is a mismatch between the package versions (the AMD64 architecture includes 1.10.1+dfsg-6 while i386 includes 1.10.1+dfsg-5).

Is it possible to resolve this so that I can install the i386 version of libgssapi-krb5-2? If not, is this a bug that should be reported?

Best Answer

There’s two possible problems with Multi-Arch:

One, a package in the dependency chain has not been M-A’d yet.

Two, and this seems to be your case, the package is not yet available in the same version on the other architecture, for example because the buildd network simply has not built it yet, or because the maintainer has uploaded a bad package (happens often enough), or because it FTBFS on the other architecture, or due to binNMUs (although that’s being worked on in Debian at the moment).

In this case, go to http://packages.debian.org/sid/libgssapi-krb5-2 and look at the architecture / version table at the bottom. They all (except hppa) have the same version now, so you should be fine. Sometimes, waiting helps ;-)

Otherwise, http://snapshot.debian.org/binary/libgssapi-krb5-2/ would have the older version for amd64 available, usually. (In this case, it does.) You could then downgrade using that. The snapshot.debian.org main page has information on how to make an APT sources.list line from that, in case just downloading the .deb and running dpkg -i doesn’t work, isn’t enough, or you’re paranoid enough (though it’s not paranoid if they’re really out to get you) that you want SecureAPT checks.

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