[arch-ports] developing the (arch64) port

[Andreas Radke]

On the port side:

- All arch64 developers should read this:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~plasmaroo/devmanual/archs/amd64/
"Applying |-fPIC| on all objects will slow down the binaries in a
drastic way."
So I will drop it again from the default CFLAGS. A new pacman package is
needed. I'll do this later when we are sure how the future development
will be.

- So we need to review all packages for sorting out packages that will
build *.so files. That's how I understand the Gentoo rule. Am I right?
We can use a script crawling through /* for *.so | pacman -Qo to get the
packages we need to patch with CFLAGS="$CFLAGS -fPIC" ??? Who can do
this first? Then check the result against Gentoo and Fedora.

- Then a recompile of the whole distro will be needed. makeworld will be
my friend :)

I hope this will solve our last problems with the iso(mkfs.ext3, lilo, grub)



What I expect from the official archlinux developers side:

- Jason, I've come to the conclusion that a common cvs and common
pkgbuilds are not good for getting the ports accepted. It would take us
a long time until i686 developers will accept bloated pkgbuilds and
preparing the "arch" tag would take its time. I still don't know why we
should need the "arch" tag. I think it would be only to declare if the
pkgbuild builds on a certain architecture. But as long as the packages
are build by a packager and not automatically we don't really need it.

- I disagree to your opinion that i686 packagers will ever be able to
build packages for the ports using pacbuild. Every package needs a check
and real installation on the destination architecture before you can
upload it to the repos. So you always will need to have a few packagers
more for each port to check packages and play with bugfixes.

- So I would prefer a separate svn/cvs for each port. Every port should
be free to decide what packages to include into the port. This may not
be as elegant as common cvs+pkgbuild but it's much easier to handle.

- No changes would be need to pacman/makepkg. Less work and less
learning for all - more KISS for everyone. And it will not take more
space on the servers or something like that.


So setup a separate svn for arch64 and create new subrepos for x86_64
and give a few of us access - we could start tomorrow!
I know some arch64 devs dying to do real productiv stuff.

Otherwise as I told you more packagers will leave the port.

AndyRTR