[csw-maintainers] ARCH=all packages

[James Lee]

On 11/11/08, 15:05:59, Philip Brown <phil at bolthole.com> wrote regarding
[csw-maintainers] ARCH=all packages:

> The issue is that he wishes to bundle specific binaries for wget in his
> pkgutil package, AND call it ARCH=all.
> (he wants to bundle one for sparc and one for x86)

> I suggested that he either remove the binaries and use pure perl,
> (either with a full wget replacement, or to use it to download
>  "the appropriate binary")
> or split it up into two separate packages, with appropriate ARCH settings
> for the binary he includes in each one.

> Our standards pages say,

> http://www.opencsw.org/standards/build
> "{ARCH} is usually the output of `uname -p`. But for certain special
>  packages that run on all solaris hardware, or are otherwise
>  architecture-neutral, it may be preferable to have ARCH=all "

> I say that this means that archtecture specific binaries, should not be
> in "ARCH=all" packages. Even if you do not agree that the words clearly
> state that, it was certainly my INTENTION when I wrote the standard.
> I wanted "ARCH=all" to clearly indicate, "this package will work
> EVERYWHERE, it will never need recompiling, and it is safe to be shared
> in some kind of NFS /opt/csw for any and all solaris machines to use."

We do make arch specific packages that include binaries that don't
run on all machines, eg, amd64 files in i386 packages and vis2 files
in sparc packages.

Therefore if an isaexec like mechanism is used to invoke wget then it
meets "this package will work EVERYWHERE".  CSWelipse used to be an
example of this, from eclipse-3.0-SunOS5.8-all-CSW.pkg.gz:
/opt/csw/lib/eclipse/eclipse.i386
/opt/csw/lib/eclipse/eclipse.sparc
out of an 80MB package.

Unlike eclipse, wget is many times bigger that pkgutil so why not just
make each arch specific.  We normally split out arch neutral files to
save storage space eg, the language files of OpenOffice.org, but here
there is only small saving on mirror storage but offset by a large
increase user download and user storage.

-rwxr-xr-x   1 james    staff     164576 Nov 10 17:25 wget-i386*
-rwxr-xr-x   1 james    staff     224672 Nov 10 17:25 wget-sparc*
-rwxr-xr-x   1 james    staff      29124 Nov 11 08:41 pkgutil*

The gain is what?  To offer a single download for pkgutil and so
simplify the first step documentation and set up actions.


My choice is use perl as the default downloader.  Task one for the
tool can be to install CSWwget.



James.