6

(trimmed) dpkg -l output on a recent debian bullseye (v11.3) machine:

SE  Name              Version             Arch  Description
ii  bind9-host        1:9.16.27-1~deb11u1 amd64 DNS Lookup Utility
ii  bind9-libs:amd64  1:9.16.27-1~deb11u1 amd64 Shared Libraries used by BIND 9
               ^^^^^

Question: why does the name field for the bind9-libs package show the architecture/abi whereas the name field for the bind9-host does not show the architecture/abi?

FWIW:

$ dpkg --print-architecture
amd64


$ grep -A6 "Package: bind9-host" /var/lib/dpkg/status
Package: bind9-host
Status: install ok installed
Priority: standard
Section: net
Installed-Size: 376
Maintainer: Debian DNS Team <team+dns@tracker.debian.org>
Architecture: amd64


$ grep -A6 "Package: bind9-libs" /var/lib/dpkg/status
Package: bind9-libs
Status: install ok installed
Priority: standard
Section: libs
Installed-Size: 3734
Maintainer: Debian DNS Team <team+dns@tracker.debian.org>
Architecture: amd64
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    Related: for installed packages, dpkg -s bind9-libs would be less error-prone for getting that inormation. Or, if you insist on manually parsing /var/lib/dpkg/status, then something like awk '/Package: bind9-libs/, /^$/ { print }' /var/lib/dpkg/status would show correct number of lines, instead of arbirary (and wrong) grep -A6.
    – Matija Nalis
    May 18 at 23:44

1 Answer 1

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9

Adding one more line would reveal the relevant field:

$ grep -A7 "Package: bind9-libs" /var/lib/dpkg/status
Package: bind9-libs
Status: install ok installed
Priority: standard
Section: libs
Installed-Size: 3734
Maintainer: Debian DNS Team <team+dns@tracker.debian.org>
Architecture: amd64
Multi-Arch: same

bind9-libs is marked “Multi-Arch: same”, which means it can be co-installed for multiple architectures (e.g. amd64 and i386). For packages with this property, dpkg shows the architecture along with the package name.

bind9-hosts isn’t marked as such, therefore it isn’t co-installable and can only ever be present for one architecture.

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