[pacman-dev] Arch neutrral packages

[Dan McGee]

On 4/9/07, Jason Chu <jason at archlinux.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 09, 2007 at 11:44:20PM +0100, Andrew Fyfe wrote:
> > Is it worth adding something like arch=(NOARCH) for packages that are
> > arch neutral (ie they only contain text files, scripts...) so we don't
> > have 2 identical packages for i686 and x86_64.
> >
> > Andrew
>
> There's been talk of this.  I think it's a good idea.  Apparently codemac
> thinks it's a bad idea.
>
> When I talked to phrakture about it a while back, his issue IIRC was that
> it's an arbitrary name and one day there might be a NOARCH architecture
> that we have to support... or something like that.
>
> Jason

This is one of those ideas that the devil is in the details. I was
thinking something like this a while back:
arch=('all')

Which would allow it to always be built, irregardless of the host type
of the machine. This would only require reserving one keyword, "all".

However, what does this allow us to do? Build a package called
foo-1.0-1-all.pkg.tar.gz? I believe sync DB's can store the filename
of the package, so this would work. However, unless we get rid of
seperate directories for each architecture, this doesn't do much for
us, besides save build time (which pacbuild will negate much of).

In addition, I think hardcoding somewhere that 'all' means 'i686' and
'x86_64' is a terrible idea, as this ruins the idea of making adding
architectures easy. We can't ever have a list of 'all' architectures.

I guess I don't know exactly what it gains us by having an 'all', but
if you can come up with a few scenarios, let me (and the list) know.

-Dan