Hi all,

I personally have packages that do not build for Kinetic because:

- couchdb was not released for Jessie

- there is not libopenni-dev on ARM

I am sure there are other cases (coladadom no ?) and more valid cases will pop-up: what if you want to re-package a driver that is binary and x86 only ? what if you have intrinsics that are x86 only ? what if Debian uses different packages than Ubuntu ? (like libav and ffmpeg I believe).

While we could disable the jobs one by one maybe in the short run, we want something that's manageable by maintainers for more flexibility.

I propose the following:

- an extension to

http://www.ros.org/reps/rep-0140.html#architecture-independent to support an architecture tag. Not sure if we need something as specific as armv7 or armv8 or just use arm but we need some official list (gcc's ? https://gcc.gnu.org/backends.html , Debian's ? https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch02s01.html.en )

- a re-use of release_platforms (from http://www.ros.org/reps/rep-0141.html#distribution-file) in yet another package.xml tag to prevent the build for some platforms.

E.g: I just want to build for x86 Jessie:

<platform>jessie</platform>

Or maybe have exclusion tags:

<architecture_exclude>arm</architecture_exclude>

<platform>ubuntu</platform>

Ideas ? Thx.