architecture-specific upload issues

[Bdale Garbee <bdale@gag.com>]

James Troup (J.J.Troup@comp.brad.ac.uk) wrote:
: Uploads with source would still go to the original *changes lists, but
: binary _only_ uploads would go to their respective architecture
: *changes lists.

I think we should keep all changes announcements on one list, and firm up the
policy about what the Subject line should look like.  We have too bleeping
many lists to keep up with already.  Personally, I hope to be uploading for
three architectures at once (i386, alpha, sparc) for my package uploads before
too much longer... all with one changes file.  I suspect this will take a few
iterations to get the logistics right, but that's my goal.

While I'm thinking about this:

Note that there's actually a bigger problem lurking out there... our model
assumes that we have one set of sources that compile for all architectures,
and this is clearly the right goal.  However, I suspect that only in the
stable released tree is it ever likely that we can achieve total syncronization
of the revisions of all the packages across all the architectures.  

So, one thought is should this becomes one of the goals during the freeze 
process, and a release criteria for a stable release?  The other side of this
is that in unstable, we ought to think about whether it's ok to only have the 
"latest" source packages around, or whether we need some way to keep multiple
source revisions around to have the sources matching all the binary packages.  

Further, common practice with the alpha port right now is to patch the sources
as needed to build the binary package, release the binary package with the
same rev number, and submit the patch as a bug report against the package.
This means that since we don't have support for architecture-specific diffs
in our upload process, the only binary package that is guaranteed to match
the sources at a given revision is the binary package for the primary platform
of the maintainer of that package.  I suppose we *could* do full non-maintainer
uploads, but this would just make more overhead for everyone.  Anyone have any
strong opinions about how we should be doing this?

I don't know if any of this is really worth worrying about... if we strive to
have everything in sync for stable releases, the lack of synchronization
across architectures might just be one of the documented attributes of the
"unstable" tree... and the frozen tree to a lesser extent when it exists.  

Bdale