Dear Maintainer,

While bug #675320 added support for multi-arch for the main packages, it seems
the development package was overlooked. As such, it is not currently possible to
install the dev package for multiple architectures (eg. amd64 and i386) at the
same time.

Trying to co-install multiple variants results in apt-get/aptitude trying to first
remove previously installed packages. Here's the trace when trying to install
the i386 variant on a system where the amd64 variant is already installed:

$ sudo aptitude install libevent-dev:i386
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libevent-core-2.0-5:i386{a} libevent-dev:i386{b} libevent-extra-2.0-5:i386{a} libevent-openssl-2.0-5:i386{a} libevent-pthreads-2.0-5:i386{a}
0 packages upgraded, 5 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2 not upgraded.
Need to get 569 kB of archives. After unpacking 1,971 kB will be used.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 libevent-dev : Conflicts: libevent-dev:i386 but 2.0.21-stable-3 is to be installed
 libevent-dev:i386 : Conflicts: libevent-dev but 2.0.21-stable-3 is installed
The following actions will resolve these dependencies:

     Remove the following packages:
1)     libevent-dev [2.0.21-stable-3 (now, stable)]


Accept this solution? [Y/n/q/?] q


I checked the control file in testing/sid (libevent-2.1-6 (2.1.8-stable-4))
and the problem is also visible there.

Best regards,
François

F. Poirotte <fpoirotte+debian-bugs@gmail.com> ezt írta (időpont: 2018.
ápr. 7., Szo, 18:33):

Yes, this is correct.

Header files differ between architectures:

$ diffoscope libevent-dev_2.1.8-stable-4_*
...
│ │ ├── ./usr/include/event2/event-config.h
│ │ │ @@ -439,33 +439,33 @@
│ │ │     your system. */
│ │ │  /* #undef EVENT__PTHREAD_CREATE_JOINABLE */
│ │ │
│ │ │  /* The size of `int', as computed by sizeof. */
│ │ │  #define EVENT__SIZEOF_INT 4
│ │ │
│ │ │  /* The size of `long', as computed by sizeof. */
│ │ │ -#define EVENT__SIZEOF_LONG 8
│ │ │ +#define EVENT__SIZEOF_LONG 4
...

This can be fixed, but the -dev packages are not co-installable currently.

Cheers,
Balint

This is a bit annoying, when using libevent-dev in a CI container aimed
at building for multiple architectures, we have to install the
arch-specific package version manually before each arch build job.

You mentioned it can be fixed. How would you envision that ? Ideally
upstream should geenrate a header file with SIZEOF macros, but that may
be hard to change as it could break some users.

Hi,

On 2025. Jul 26., Sat at 23:21, Laurent Pinchart < laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com> wrote:


Yes, this change could be offered upstream.

Cheers,
Balint

I've reported the issue upstream in
https://github.com/libevent/libevent/issues/1806 and linked to this bug
report. I expect them to follow up on github though.