Re: Who decides arch names?
Andreas Jochens <aj@andaco.de> writes:
> On 04-Jun-02 16:24, John Goerzen wrote:
>> almost maniacal aversion to working together? Why could you not have
>> opened a discussion on debian-amd64 a month ago, or even last week?
>
> True. This should have been discussed on the lists. But it is not too
> late for a discussion now. At the moment the current amd64 port
> uses a patched dpkg anyway so no real harm has been done.
>
>> > The first issue is simply a matter of rebuilding, which shouldn't take
>> > too long relatively. Your patches and fixes will still all work,
>> > hopefully.
>>
>> *simply* is somewhat of an overstatement. Are you aware of the effort
>> required to bootstrap a new Debian arch?
>
> It will _not_ be necessary to bootstrap amd64/x86_64 again because of
> the name change. The existing packages can be used to build new ones
> with a different architecture name (I tried that and created a small test
> archive with 'x86_64' as the arch name and it worked so far).
No they can not be used. The wanna-build and archive scripts break
down. If the old packages are to be used every single package has to
be patched to a higher version to avoid conflicts.
Next the buildd script breaks down because none of the build-depends
are installable without extra force flags.
Third all amd64 adding patches have to be rewritten again for x86-64
which is over 50 package I believe. We just got a bunch of them added
to sid and now we would have to bug the maintainers again.
All of that means extra work hacking around in things for the benefit
of changing to a probably harmfull name.
You haven't been around long enough to see the work we have done and
what it entails. Those of us who have know exactly what is involved in
rebuilding the complete archive since we already did a partial rebuild
on alioth and that took several man month already just to upload stuff.
>> Plenty of packages rely on dpkg architecture information, and this
>> almost certainly wil break packages.
>
> Of coures, some things will break. But in most cases maintainers will only
> have to replace amd64 with x86_64 in some places.
>
> This should not be too difficult. It will require much more work to
> port the remaining ~5% of the source packages to amd64/x86_64 :)
It adds 5% extra work to the 5% work that is still there. Don't make
it sound likeusing x86-64 would magically make those 5% compile.
> Regards
> Andreas Jochens
MfG
Goswin
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