[arch-dev-public] Discussion - Increasing our CPU requirements

[Morten Linderud]

On Sun, Mar 29, 2020 at 03:39:51PM +0100, Filipe Laíns via arch-dev-public wrote:
> > To have a separate architecture would require automated builds, which
> > requires being able to sign packages automatically.  And we have not
> > achieved database signing in 9 years....  I'm looking for a boost that
> > could be achieved now.
> 
> No, it would not. Where is this coming from? I already build split
> packages with SIMD instructions, I make the PKGBUILD build for 2
> architectures instead with a minimal patch.
> 
> If pacman is not able to handle parallel architectures, we should fix
> that. I think it's a valid use case.

Well, how do you think we supported two architectures? Why do you think
`extra-x86_64-build` is named the way it is?

The "problem" is that we have no intentions of building 1 package 4 times and
keep things in sync by hand, it was tedious enough with i686, which was part of
why it was dropped in the first place. Thus we want build-servers to do this for
us. 

Allan is going to have a hard time argueing that the minimal improvements is
going to justify the absurd time we'll end up building things by hand, it's the
crux of the problem essentially. I'm also sure he knows this.

Surely we can bikeshed about which architectures to support, what we should
discuss is how we should accomplish the task in general.

> Furthermore, if you do indeed whish to move this forward please present
> us with reasonable data. Take a few packages that would benefit from
> this, build them with the proposed architecture and show us benchmarks.
> I think it's gonna be very hard for you to find packages with
> considerable improvement but I might be wrong, please show me.

See last paragraph.

-- 
Morten Linderud
PGP: 9C02FF419FECBE16
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