[pacman-dev] repo-add sanity check

[Xavier]

On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 3:00 PM, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
>
> Following Xavier's hint in an earlier reply, these are all packages that
> were build a long time ago - before the arch field in PKGBUILD.
>
> e.g.
>> pacman -Si barcode | grep Build
> Build Date     : Sun 22 Feb 2004 14:10:37 EST    (!!!!)
>
> These will not really matter until something happens that force a rebuild of
> the repo-db.  They could probably all do with a rebuild to get newer
> optimization and fix man paths, etc, anyway.
>

I always think it is a good idea to rebuild packages after a while,
even to just check they still build with current gcc, the source is
still valid, and also to make use of the makepkg and repo-add
improvements that could have happened.
Avoiding too old packages should increase the overall quality of the
packages set.

But about this specific problem of the ARCH field missing, it is a
problem at all? I am actually not sure what this ARCH field is for,
isn't it only used on pacman -Si operation, which is totally harmless?
The arch is not displayed and that's it.
I actually don't know why is a arch field needed anywhere. in PKGBUILD
and .PKGINFO and desc.
>From my ignorant point of view, the only thing for which I understand
the use is CARCH in makepkg.conf and putting the CARCH in package
filenames, so that we know for which arch a package is. Following this
point of view, if we want to avoid depending on filenames, it also
makes sense to put it in .PKGINFO inside the package.
Then I just have to understand how is the arch field in pkgbuild and
in the database useful. :)