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

[Karolina Lindqvist]

söndag 16 december 2007 skrev Travis Willard:

> 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.

I looked at lowarch, but it appears to be not maintained anymore and have a 
different focus than what I have. I instead started out with the partial i586 
port of archlinux that I did a year ago, and go on from there. core is now 
updated to current, and I am proceeding to extra. My repository will go 
on-line, as soon as I have everything needed to make this machine my online 
machine. Which means web-server and firewall software.

The work to make it run on i586 is easy, the time-consuming problem is to fix 
bugs in archlinux as I go. Now, as one year ago, I find that many packages 
just don't build, and a few are so outdated that the source version have been 
retired and is not available.

SUGGESTION 1:
Have a central repository for all the source files needed by archlinux, and 
modify makepkg so that when the source cannot be found on the original place, 
it is gotten from this backup repository. That way makepkg will always work 
on a package.

SUGGESTION 2:
Have a spider that goes through the abs tree, and check if every source file 
is available. When a source is found missing on its original place, an email 
is sent to the respective developer for action. Until he fixes the problem, 
the backup source file repository will provide the source.

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

Ok, I will avoid sending in bug reports that might be related to i586, and 
only if I am really, really sure that it applies to i686.

> 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.

I understand the policy of archlinux, that it should work on the developers 
machines, and that there is no big interest of expanding to anything else. 
About the makepkg erroring out, on second thought I think it is a good idea.

Karolina