Architectures (Operating Systems and CPU Architectures)
Hi everyone:
I'm mailing this to both debian-policy and debian-devel, because I'd
like to get the perspective from both sides -- the policy one, and the
"in practice" thinking.
Currently architectures are defined as a string which contains two
parts, an operating system name, and a microprocessor architecture. I
sort of object to the idea of the field being called Architecture
rather than Platform, but the choice has already been made and I guess
we're stuck with it.
Anyway, the idea is that we have pairs like:
linux-i386, meaning it's a Linux operating system, with i386 processor
architecture.
What I am wondering is, if we have the full set of operating system
names, currently:
darwin
freebsd
hurd
kfreebsd
knetbsd
kopensolaris
linux
netbsd
openbsd
solaris
And we have the full set of processor architectures, currently:
lpia
sh4eb
sh4
alpha
mipsel
ia64
avr32
sparc
armel
armeb
arm
mips
m68k
s390
sh3
s390x
hppa
sh3eb
powerpc
m32r
amd64
i386
ppc64
Does that mean we should be able to just pick something from both
lists, and turn that into a valid string to put in the Architecture
field?
solaris-armel, for example.
The reason I ask is because `dpkg-architectures -L' outputs the
strings concatenated together, and I'm not totally sure if all the
possible combinations are there (there are 212 combinations output by:
dpkg-architectures -L | wc -l). There are 23 processor types, and 10
operating systems by my count, which means there should be 230
combinations of the two, so some are missing, or perhaps my math is
wrong.
My question is, does anyone know of cases where a given operating
system and architecture does not constitute a valid platform (ie,
Architecture in the d/control file sense).
I am trying to write a validating parser, so I need to be able to pick
out impossible platform combinations, if there are indeed any. Another
question might be, why are the given operating systems unsupported on
those architectures? Is that likely to change in the future?
Cheers,
Jonathan
Cc: My Google Summer of Code project mentor, Dominique Dumont.
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