On 3/2/21 8:10 PM, Allan McRae via arch-dev-public wrote:
On 3/3/21 11:03 am, Eli Schwartz via arch-dev-public wrote:
I wonder, might this be an interesting time to reintroduce multiple architectures?
We used to offer i686 and x86_64.
Maybe now we could offer x86_64, x86_64-v2, and x86_64-v3. Or go right to -v4.
That is a possibility that has been discussed over the years. It was previously decided that we needed other architecture builds to be automated, and thus automated package signing. This becomes a possibility once we manage to sign databases (which will hit a decade of pacman support in October!).
I wasn't on the packaging team back when i686 was supported, so I don't know about the experience firsthand. But I thought it was just "run extra-*-build twice and commit the result"? Like i686 builds from a developer with an x86_64 laptop, this is something that should be doable for all architectures from one machine. Building the more advanced architectures might, for some people, require using build.archlinux.org (via offload-build), which come to think of it supports x86-64-v3 but not x86-64-v4... I'm aware of discussion about CPU architectures that are not x86 and which, by and large, members of the packaging team don't have hardware for. (RISC-V, aarch64) This is thoroughly blocked on the theory of autobuilding for practical reasons in ways that x86-64-v2 is not. -- Eli Schwartz Bug Wrangler and Trusted User