-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Alexey Eremenko wrote:
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Alexey Eremenko <al4321@gmail.com> Date: Apr 19, 2006 4:48 PM Subject: Attention: Lots of SUSE packages are packaged incorrect To: suse-linux-e@suse.com I would like to discuss with the SUSE community one mistake commonly done by SUSE packagers: more specifically - the RPM architecture in SUSE. I have found a LOT of noarch packages built for the i586 architecture in SUSE Linux 10.0. I propose to people to identify those packages, that should be made "noarch" but for some obscure reason are not.
Let me guess, python and perl packages ? :)
Most packages that were built in the incorrect way were documentation, but some others were written in Interpreted languages. (like Python) One example of interpreted language package that is i586 but should be noarch is : "eric" IDE I have not dive too deep, but I'm sure there are other examples. The other incorrectly packaged packages are docs - quick search returns me:
Indeed you have not "dive too deep". While most of those packages only contain interpreted bytecode (or plain source), 1) some also contain compiled code (e.g. _xxx.so or .pyo for Python) 2) they are installed into an arch-specific subdirectory, namely /usr/lib/python/site-packages on i586, and /usr/lib64/python/site-packages on x86_64 Same goes for Perl. That's the reason why they are arch-specific. And if you ask yourself (or us) "but why ?", it's because those directories may also contain compiled code.
linux:/mnt/cdrom/suse/i586 # ls | grep doc | sort | cat -n 1 apache2-doc-2.0.54-10.i586.rpm 2 atk-doc-1.10.3-2.i586.rpm
And that's because with RPM, you can only define the architecture for the whole spec file, which includes the main package and all the subpackages. You cannot define a subpackage (e.g. foo-doc) to have another architecture than the main package (foo). ...
now, 33 doc packages are i386 ? And, of course all of them contain binaries, huh! :) Look, it wastes time & server space to get noarch packges built for different platforms.
Why is this ?
Please buy yourself a clue before starting to flame. cheers - -- -o) Pascal Bleser http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/ /\\ <pascal.bleser@skynet.be> <guru@unixtech.be> _\_v The more things change, the more they stay insane. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFESB5Dr3NMWliFcXcRAvsWAKCaSeZxFQI0CaAfK4DYUEA2wAgmxwCgumeK nJgmvV1JE2dpVaPvXXuZ/y0= =cYjV -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----