Re: architecture-independent binary packages

[Marc Espie <espie%nerim.net@localhost>]

On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 11:59:36AM +0200, Edgar Fuß wrote:
> Does pkgsrc have a notion of binary packages that are not specific to a 
> particular architecture?
> If I have a packages only consisting of shell/perl scripts, share data etc., 
> must I build separate binaries for different architectures?

We've had this notion in OpenBSD for a very long while.
In practice, this isn't very useful, since bulk-builds will tend to build
everything anyways to check that the tree is in good shape. And even tweaks
to say "okay, I'm a slow arch so use the fast arch-independent packages we
have" didn't meet with a lot of enthusiasm.

Plus, there's some extra burden in making sure stuff is really 
arch-independent. Some builds will have configure script that insist
on hardcoding irrelevant stuff in the build (heck, python insists that
our major version IS relevant, where 4.9 -> 5.0 is business-as-usual
in the OpenBSD world).

We even have "fat" packages (not fat binaries), where I can take several 
packages for various architectures and get a package that shares every file
with the same sha256. That one didn't get a lot of acceptance either.

Bottom-line, the knobs in the *.mk / pkgtools code are the easy part.
Getting a whole infrastructure (people + build + mirrors) to use it is the
hard part.  And there's very little sense in doing this if it's not gonna
get used.

-> #fail on our side.  I wrote the code, it's seldom used, and not really
checked.