Re: Endianness of data files in MultiArch

[Osamu Aoki <osamu@debian.org>]

Hi,

On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 08:40:35AM +0800, Aron Xu wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 00:14, Osamu Aoki <osamu@debian.org> wrote:
> > [...]
> >
> > Just think any phrase data with its content size in 16bit integer.
> >
> > I have bigger example :-)
> >
> > ipadic: Uncompressed size: 44.5 M
> >
> > This one, I made them arch:any to build many binary packages.  Similar
> > packages use install time conversion trick to keep them "arch: all" but
> > this install takes time.
> >
> 
> This trick is broken. Dpkg doesn't have similar features like `rpm -V`
> at present, which verifies if files on disk are identical to what was
> installed.

If it installs into /usr/share ... I agree it is broken.

But if postinst installs into /var/lib/<pkg>/... using arch indep text
data in /usr/share data, it is OK.  Just a bit too much data
duplication, though.

> I believe it's useful and will land in dpkg someday (but
> don't ask me for patch now...). By coverting data files at user's
> install, it breaks when the package manager verifies the file's
> integrity. I prefer to use more mirror space to doing such thing if I
> have to choose between them, which is the current status.
> 
> > [...]
> >
> > I think PO files cases are manageable.  They can use one endianess for
> > all platform.
> >
> > But for any other generic special purpose natural language processing
> > code, it is impossible to force upstream to complicates code to use
> > particular endianness.
> >
> 
> Agreed.
> 
> >> So unless the program is restarted for every input (which would be the
> >> first thing to eliminate to improve responsiveness) there shouldn't be a
> >> problem with "fixing" this. It just means extra work you might not be
> >> willing (or have time) to invest.
> >
> > If we are ready to rewite core of such code, you are right.  But if we
> > simply accept upstream code design, we will endup making multiple of
> > such semi-arch depended data in archive as arch: any.
> >
> > Osamu
> 
> IMHO it's really bad to maintain such a delta between Debian and upstream.

I agree and I do not think I want to do that.

Regards,

Osamu