Re: Fnal request for atlas package input
Greetings, and thank you and everyone else for your feedback!
Peter Cordes <peter@llama.nslug.ns.ca> writes:
> On Fri, Mar 02, 2001 at 10:35:06AM -0500, Camm Maguire wrote:
> > OK, I think I agree. What do you think of having one package which
> > covers major subarch divisions, or a package providing only the
> > generic, and allowing the user to rebuild and tune to their hardware?
> > The latter is certainly simpler, but
> > 1) It assumes some ability on the users part to handle the versioning
> > of the custom packages, so that their package isn't automatically
> > 'upgraded' to the generic
> > 2) Can't share /usr across different subarchs (does anyone do this
> > anyway?)
> > 3) Have to remember to rebuild when upgrading CPU, or moving system
> > disk into a different machine.
> >
> > Maybe these issues aren't really that important, after all. There was
> > originally some preference expressed on debian-beowulf for this
> > functionality, but the balance seems to have shifted.
>
> What if you had the package install source and build the libraries in the
> postinst script, according to a config file that specified what arch/subarch
> options to use? Then you could configure it once, and upgrades would get it
> rebuilt when needed.
>
Good idea, but this takes a *long* time, and the machine needs to be
quiet, and one has to be very clever about telling postinst when this
rebuild is unecessary, and one cannot just have a runtime package, but
needs a full devel environment on each machine where atlas is
installed.
> People who wanted to share /usr across subarchs could use symlinks to a
> per-machine directory that point back to the appropriate shared version.
> (like /etc/alternatives) It might be hard to automate this, but it
> shouldn't be too hard to do for the end user. Don't worry about it when
> packaging.
>
> This would make for a self-modifying package, but at least we are
> generating more files, rather than removing some that came with it.
>
Meditating on this and the other comments a bit, I think the best
thing is to have separate binary packages for the major subarchs,
which install into sublid directories so as not to conflict with each
other, and then add an environment variable the user can set when
building their custom package to really tune to their hardware.
Hope to get it done soon!
Take care,
> --
> #define X(x,y) x##y
> Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@llama.nslug. , ns.ca)
>
> "The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish the hours!
> Confound him, too, who in this place set up a sundial, to cut and hack
> my day so wretchedly into small pieces!" -- Plautus, 200 BCE
>
>
--
Camm Maguire camm@enhanced.com
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