[pacman-dev] architecture warn/check

[Dan McGee]

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 5:12 PM, Aaron Griffin<aaronmgriffin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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>"

I'm going to disagree with this- my default was going to be "don't
check" if left unset. However, I could go either way as long as both
"auto" and "nocheck" are somehow accommodated.

-Dan