Wow, this degenerated into a flamewar quickly. Can we all calm down just a tad? If we were truly at an impasse, Allan and I wouldn't even be looking at these patches. The biggest reason I'm putting up a stop sign and red flags is the lack of explanation at the questions I've posed, and stating I've only offered destructive criticism is not the truth- I just don't understand this whole thing. On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 10:54 AM, Thomas Bächler <thomas@archlinux.org> wrote:
Am 21.01.2011 17:01, schrieb Allan McRae:
That reply is just wrong... i686 is not a restricted flavour of i386. It is the other way around. I can not run i686 optimised software on an i386 system. Just ask all the Via C3 owners who do not have that "nopl" instruction and the joys they had with glibc-2.12.
That is not the point. We should reflect what the dynamic linker tries to do whenever we want to load a binary:
1) If we install a i686 version of libfoo.so.2 onto a i386 system, the linker will still try to load that version (and fail with SIGILL). 2) If we install a x86_64 version and a i686 version of libfoo.so.2 into the system, and launch a 32 bit binary, the linker will determine that it cannot load the the x86_64 version, but the i686 version.
So, in order to "do it right", we only need to reflect the distinction the linker does in 2). Not even the linker makes the distinction in 1), so why should we?
And now think about use cases: The package architecture is already in PKGINFO. So the only distinction we need to make is between 32 bit and 64 bit binaries - the only case where you are able to run more than one architecture in the same system is when executing 32 bit binaries on a 64 bit platform with a backward compatibility mode for 32 bit. (AFAIK, this is not only the case for x86, but for some other platforms, too).
The only info we should include into the soprovides/depends is whether we have a 32 bit or a 64 bit binary. There shouldn't be an explicit statement about architecture.
Taking a step back here, if we want to not lock ourself into ELF-only (OSX does not use it), it sounds like using objdump due to it's use of the BFD backend which understands multiple file formats. From objdump -a, although the output is rather arcane, we should always be able to get the file format of the library, which I believe is the most important to matching what the linker does. Sidenote: I saw this when running objdump --info on my x86_64 box: plugin (header little endian, data little endian) BFD: BFD (GNU Binutils) 2.21.0.20101217 assertion fail /build/src/binutils/bfd/plugin.c:453 objdump: plugin: Bad value
So there is a real problem that you can not get the correct value out of the library on i686 systems. We could use CARCH, but that does not work for multilib stuff, which was the entire point of including it in the first place...
I think my previous comments should make this irrelevant, unless I am completely wrong.
and if we do keep it, it has *nothing* to do with a version in the normal ordering sense- it would belong as part of the provision name.
I had that before and Allan didn't like it.
http://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/2010-February/010420.html
I did not like provides=(libfoo.so) magically turning into "libfoo.so-i686" in the .PKGINFO file. The details of the package should reflect what is in the PKGBUILD.
See, this is what I still don't understand. Is this libprovides, or is this "well we'll hijack your provides array sometimes depending on what you put there". It *still* hasn't been explained how this thing works in either a commit message or docs. Do I include soprovides=() in my PKGBUILD? Do I need to insert something in provides=() to get a library to show up in the final package? Is it all completely automatic- all libraries in the package get an automatic provide entry generated? This is why I am so damn frustrated with these patches.
So, to summarize:
1) Dan does not want a new PKGINFO field to be introduced for this.
Where did I say that- if I did, I'm not remembering.
2) Allan does not want any auto-generated meta-info in the provides and depends in PKGINFO. No, he stated he doesn't want *magic changes* to data the user specified in the PKGBUILD. I think he and I would be more comfortable if this was less magic.
3) Dan does not want non-versioning information in the version field in provides/depends in PKGINFO. Sure.
Where does that leave us? Essentially, we cannot get this feature implemented, as all those restrictions combined leave us with no options. Clearly, you don't see any options either, as you only provide destructive criticism, no suggestions on how you think it should be done.