On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 4:33 PM, Dan McGee<dpmcgee@gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 3:38 PM, Steven Blatchford<sblatchford@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Dan,
I'm sure this has been brought up in the pacman ML but I couldn't find it quickly. Do you think it would be useful to check the architecture of the machine (eg the output of 'uname -m') against the binary pacman is downloading? Twice I've sync'd the file /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist via unison to my slicehost server from my i686 network. The latest bash4.0 upgrade hurt... like there were tears... and henceforth it's now known in my house as "Grumpy Sunday".
I have no trouble creating a wrapper script, I just thought I'd toss it out there.
Lastly, if you suggest I go the wrapper script method, besides trying to parse the mirrorlist file, is there a nice way to get the architecture of a file from pacman before it downloads it? /installs it?
Would you mind sending this to the pacman-dev ML or filing a bug report instead next time? Unfortunately it will just get buried in my personal email inbox. I'm copying the list on this response.
With that said, I think we could perhaps take some precautions for such things, such as adding a pacman.conf option to verify the architecture. Something such as:
RootDir = / DBPath = /var/lib/pacman Architecture = x86_64
Where the accepted options would be something like:
Architecture = { i686, x86_64, ppc, etc... } or "auto", which would make a uname system call, check the machine[] field, and use that instead of a value being hardcoded?
What does the rest of the list think? This wouldn't be too hard, and of course a package coded with architecture "any" would get a free pass.
Yeah, I definitely don't think using "uname -m" by default should be done - what happens if I booted and i686 livecd to I could recover something borked on my x86_64 machine? "Can't install package, wrong arch" Grrr. Sure, you could use "linux64" in this case, but if you're already chrooted to a live system that's nicely configured, this extra step shouldn't be needed. I don't think "auto" should be a setting though - I think it should only be used if Architecture isn't found in pacman.conf and should output a warning saying "Architecture not set in pacman.conf, using <blah>"