11.1. Architecture specification strings

If a program needs to specify an architecture specification string in some place, it should select one of the strings provided by dpkg-architecture -L. The strings are in the format os-arch, though the OS part is sometimes elided, as when the OS is Linux.

Note that we don’t want to use arch-debian-linux to apply to the rule architecture-vendor-os since this would make our programs incompatible with other Linux distributions. We also don’t use something like arch-unknown-linux, since the unknown does not look very good.

11.1.1. Architecture wildcards

A package may specify an architecture wildcard. Architecture wildcards are in the format any (which matches every architecture), os-any, or any-cpu. 1