[arch-general] problem compiling for i586 with new makepkg

[Travis Willard]

On Dec 16, 2007 11:48 AM, Karolina Lindqvist
<karolina.lindqvist at kramnet.se> wrote:
> söndag 16 december 2007 skrev Mister Dobalina:
>
> > The point is that the developers don't want to get a
> > bunch of bug reports for things that might be
> > i586-specific problems. They are saying "we've tested
> > the package that is built using this PKGBUILD on i686
> > and/or x86_64, and if you have a problem with it let
> > us know, but if you use this PKGBUILD to build for
> > some other architecture, you're on your own".
> >
> > Well, that's exactly what it means now. But the devs
> > don't want to go to the work of doing that on i586,
> > because arch is an i686/x86_64-optimized distribution,
> > and has never claimed to be "tried and working" on
> > i586.
>
> Is that the opinion of all the developers?
>
> If it is so, I have to consider forking off my own distribution based on
> archlinux. It simplifies some things, since I can deviate and don't have to
> care for policies and so on. But forks can create extra trouble in the
> future, and it always splits up human resources.
>
> Anyway, I already have archi586 running, and currently I am mostly spending
> time with bugs in archlinux, and not so much with the i586 implementation.

As far as I know we don't have plans for an i586 port.  There's
lowarch, which I think was mentioned around this thread already
(apologies for not reading the backlogs) - if you're that dedicated
about maintaining i586 then you should get in contact with the lowarch
people and try to combine efforts, instead of doing it all yourself.
We encourage ports - we certainly don't have the manpower to maintain
a ton of architectures, and if others are willing to provide Arch for
different platforms, we won't stand in the way.

As far as the way Arch currently is, we started out with i686 and
expanded to include x86_64 when it became a popular choice and we had
willing volunteers for it.  We don't currently support i586
"officially" and, as far as I know, have no plan to - partly because
none of the devs have the need to run Arch on i586 hardware, I
imagine, although I might be wrong.

So yes, bug reports for problems specifically on i586 (though I doubt
there would be many differences) will probably be considered
low-priority.

Our original target was i686 and greater - that was part of the
distro's selling points, due to the added responsiveness and
snappiness i686 optimization gave the system.

PKGBUILDs list what architectures we've personally built and tested
them on.  The fact that makepkg errors out when an architecture isn't
listed in the arch=(...) array is, IMO, probably not the best
behaviour, and in pacman 3.1's makepkg there's the option to ignore
that as a warning instead of refusing to build.

If you want to grab the development (-git) version of pacman, you can
use Dan's devel repo by adding the following to pacman.conf:

[pacman-git]
Server = http://www.archlinux.org/~dan/pacman-git/

And install it with pacman -Sy pacman-git.