Re: reusing machine independent packages? (was Re: Package binaries for NetBSD/arm 4.0 / pkgsrc-2008Q1)

["Steven M. Bellovin" <smb%cs.columbia.edu@localhost>]

On Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:54:07 -0500 (CDT)
"Jeremy C. Reed" <reed%reedmedia.net@localhost> wrote:

> On Tue, 28 Oct 2008, Havard Eidnes wrote:
> 
> > In the case of ec-fonts-mftraced, I admit to having cheated, and
> > put a doctored package in place, since there's no MD binaries in
> > that package.  However, the program which generates the fonts in
> > this package is floating-point intensive, and therefore not
> > exactly the best match for a shark with no floating-point unit.
> > When I had to power the build host off for a local power outage,
> > it would have had to start from scratch.
> > 
> > This particular build was done natively, the next one will use
> > distcc, will use as many binary packages as possible from this
> > build, and will be based on the pkgsrc-2008Q3 branch.
> 
> Do we have any pkgsrc variable that flags if a package is machine 
> independent?
> 
> It may be useful for fonts, documentation, interpreted scripts, etc.
> to only build the package one time and then have just symlinks on the
> FTP server (and mirrors).
> 
> Then pkg_add should notice that too so doesn't complain about
> different platform.
> 
> May also want some (optional) way to check if the generic packages
> are already available and reuse (download and install) as needed for
> bulk builds.
> 
> And a bulk build could be done for only generic, machine independent 
> packages (and their dependencies) and then upload only the machine 
> independent packages.
> 
Are there enough such packages to matter?  I.e., is it worth the effort?


                --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb