[pacman-dev] $ARCH suffix on packages

[Christian Hamar]

Hey.

> I'd like to hear reasons.  I don't really feel that "RPM and DEB do
> it" is a good enough reason.  I mean, if that reason was good enough,
> we'd be using RPM/DEB in place of pacman packages.

:)

> The way I see it, I don't think pacman needs to know the architecture
> it's running on.  Installing "pkg-foo" should be no different on i686
> or PPC.  Therefore, I think that adding the architecture suffix is
> extra information that's not really needed.
> 
> What is gained by having this suffix?

brr. Sorry, i really dont know why we started to using $ARCH suffix in
frugalware, vmiklos will answer this. But.

In my opinion if a user pulls a package from anywhere, from web or from
ftp or just he is store packages in cd or dvd, etc, then he/she can see
that what is this pack. I mean for which architecture. Just seeing the
filename and you know that foo-1.0-1-x86_64 is for x86_64 archs, -i686
for i686 archs. So users not confused to see foo-1.0-1 and foo-1.0-1 and
user just thinks, "what the hell, two same package? install that one
then" And maybe he install an i686 package to x86_64 arch :)

I know you will answer something like this: we store our packages in
distro-i686/ distro-x86_64/ dirs and why need an extra SUFFIX. 

Because of that. If you find a package somewhere or you got a mirror or
a backup sometimes you want to know from the filename that package is
for what architecture.

Think a good idea this, and this seems some "standard" nowadays. I know
you said not to say that RPM/DEB do this :) but then i says most major
distribution do this scheme whatever its pkgmanager. (except slackware)

Regards
-krix-