[pacman-dev] architecture warn/check

[Dan McGee]

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 3:38 PM, Steven Blatchford<sblatchford at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Dan,
>
> I'm sure this has been brought up in the pacman ML but I couldn't find
> it quickly.  Do you think it would be useful to check the architecture
> of the machine (eg the output of 'uname -m') against the binary pacman
> is downloading?  Twice I've sync'd the file /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist via
> unison to my slicehost server from my i686 network.  The latest bash4.0
> upgrade hurt... like there were tears... and henceforth it's now known
> in my house as "Grumpy Sunday".
>
> I have no trouble creating a wrapper script, I just thought I'd toss it
> out there.
>
> Lastly, if you suggest I go the wrapper script method, besides trying to
> parse the mirrorlist file, is there a nice way to get the architecture
> of a file from pacman before it downloads it? /installs it?

Would you mind sending this to the pacman-dev ML or filing a bug
report instead next time? Unfortunately it will just get buried in my
personal email inbox. I'm copying the list on this response.

With that said, I think we could perhaps take some precautions for
such things, such as adding a pacman.conf option to verify the
architecture. Something such as:

RootDir = /
DBPath = /var/lib/pacman
Architecture = x86_64

Where the accepted options would be something like:

Architecture = { i686, x86_64, ppc, etc... } or "auto", which would
make a uname system call, check the machine[] field, and use that
instead of a value being hardcoded?

What does the rest of the list think? This wouldn't be too hard, and
of course a package coded with architecture "any" would get a free
pass.

-Dan