[pacman-dev] architecture warn/check

[Aaron Griffin]

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 4:33 PM, Dan McGee<dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Yeah, I definitely don't think using "uname -m" by default should be
done - what happens if I booted and i686 livecd to I could recover
something borked on my x86_64 machine? "Can't install package, wrong
arch" Grrr. Sure, you could use "linux64" in this case, but if you're
already chrooted to a live system that's nicely configured, this extra
step shouldn't be needed.

I don't think "auto" should be a setting though - I think it should
only be used if Architecture isn't found in pacman.conf and should
output a warning saying "Architecture not set in pacman.conf, using
<blah>"