[csw-maintainers] ARCH=all packages

[Philip Brown]

Peter B. and I are having a disagreement about the concept of ARCH=all
packages, so I thought I would bring the discussion here.

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.

He refuses to take either path, or offer a third 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."

In other words, ARCH=all should be reserved for things like raw
arch-neutral data files, docs, java, and shellscripts/perl/python.

(I originally intended to use "ARCH=any"... however, I followed sun's
 lead; sun uses ARCH=all, and does not use ARCH=any, to the best
 of my knowlege, for this purpose)


What are peoples' comments on this?