[csw-maintainers] Package policy questions

[Roger Håkansson]

Dagobert Michelsen wrote:

> You can build it for sparcv8plus for Solaris 9 and if you want without 
> this optional dependency
> for sparcv8 for Solaris 8, but this is not mandatory.

Why Solaris9?
Its not until Solaris 10 that all non-v8plus capable CPUs are totally 
unsupported.
sun4c was dropped in Solaris 8, sun4d in Solaris 9 and sun4m in Solaris 10.

>> So the question is, what is the preferred solution, skip 64bit until 
>> all dependencies have been fixed or build a package with different 
>> features enabled for 32 and 64-bit?
> 
> The best solution would be to just upgrade to 64 bit now ;-) Kidding aside,
> it would be cleanest to restrict the features to the ones which are 
> available
> in both 32 and 64 bit

The problem with that is that many of the features which have been 
available for many years now would be gone. For example EPS/PDF support 
since ghostscript isn't 64-bit and has dependencies to old orphaned 
packages like krb5_lib. And I think that EPS/PDF support might be 
considered basic. At least would my customers be a bit angry if I would 
to remove support for them in ImageMagick.

> Different features is asking for trouble. 

I agree.

 > Maybe some others
 > can chime in in a joint-effort to garify and 64 bit enable this stuff?
 > I like packaging up libraries :-)

Me too ;)