Re: thoughts on architectures
On Tue, Feb 12, 2002 at 08:38:19AM -0600, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 11, 2002 at 01:12:28PM -0500, utsl@quic.net wrote:
> >
> > Sure: apt_0.5.4_freebsd-i386.deb vs. apt_0.5.4_i386.deb
> > ------------ ----
>
> Oh that, well. I don't care about the name. Using a human readable name
> has advantages, and should bbe preserved if possible. See my other mail,
> too.
Someone remind me what the problem with a file such as
apt_0.5.4_i386_32_netbsd_elf_netbsd-libc.deb
is? Seriously - it has all five fields, in a sane order (least -> most
specific: processor, mode, OS, binary format, libc); the use of _ in files
to designate new information fields is already well established as being
a demarcation of meta-data, and files in the old format can be trivially
renamed to the new one, if you define what the legacy values are (that is,
for Debian, the legacy values would be "32 bit, linux, elf, gnu-libc").
It does mean that some of the non-released architectures (hurd-*, netbsd-*,
freebsd-*, and probably sparc64) would have to have their files renamed,
which is a perl script that takes about an hour to write *and* check.
*If* I understand apt and dpkg correctly, it doesn't even require massive
symlink trees, since you just change the Packages files to point to the
new names for all arches released with Woody (I'm presuming, here, that
this is too major a change to make it in before Woody++); all ports which
are released at Woody++ and later would have utilities that understood the
new format, and thus, wouldn't need legacy support in the Packages file.
--
***************************************************************************
Joel Baker System Administrator - lightbearer.com
lucifer@lightbearer.com http://users.lightbearer.com/lucifer/
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