Re: binary-alpha and binary-sparc directories
On Sat, 23 Dec 1995, Ian Murdock wrote:
> I've created binary-alpha and binary-sparc directories under the
> development tree. They're both empty at the moment, of course, but
> they're ready for use whenever the development teams have something
> to put there.
>
> (BTW, I plan to rename binary to binary-i386 as soon as we finish the
> planned FTP reorganization.)
It seems that the Guidelines document needs updating to address
issues falling out of this.
One issue is whether binary packages are to be distinguished by
distribution-specific naming convention (and, if so, what that
convention is to be). Binary packages will need need distinguishing
names if they're to be uploaded to a common Incoming directory.
Will debian systems offer cross-compilation facilities? Will
the developer of a sparc-targeted package be expected to provide
an i386 build as well? If not, and some other developer provides
the i386-targeted package, which of the two source packages (which
may differ from one another) will be in the distribution?
It seems to me that packages will need a primary maintainer, who
would be responsible for the source package, and an architecture
specific maintainer for each supported binary package. One person
could act in all capacities, of course, but I'd expect that at least
some packages would have different maintainers for the different
architectures.
The way I see this working, architecture-specific maintainers with
the ability to address architecture-specific bug reports and do
architecture-specific testing would feed architecture-specific
fixes and patches to the primary package maintainer. Primary
package maintainers having, say, a sparc would install alpha
or i386 patches blindly, relying on the testing done by the
alpha and i386 maintainers, and issue a package revision update.
Reply to: