Re: RFC: Fedora Extras shipping ix86 optimized rpms?

[Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 freenet de>]

On Thu, 2004-09-02 at 05:05, Mike Barnes wrote:
> On Wed, 01 Sep 2004 09:17:41 -0700, Ulrich Drepper <drepper redhat com> wrote:
> > > 3. It would almost double the size of i386.rpms (These sse2 libs would
> > > have to be part of i386.rpms) - Is it worth it?
> > 
> > The size of the actual DSOs is not the only factor in the RPM size.
> > This means that two RPMs are bigger then one RPM with two DSO versions.
> 
> Just playing Devil's Advocate here, but if the extra optimised
> libraries are in a separate directory, wouldn't it be trivial to
> define a subpackage for them?

> Say we have libinfinite, which is a special library for executing
> infinite loops. There's an option to have an SSE2 optimised version of
> the library, which executes them even faster.
> 
> libinfinite-0.1-1.i386.rpm contains
> /usr/lib/libinfinite.so.0
> (and other common docs, utils, etc)
> 
> A subpackage, libinfinite-sse2-0.1-1.i386.rpm, contains
> /usr/lib/sse2/libinfinite.so.0
> (just the optimised version, depends on libinfinite)

There is one major drawback of this approach:
The libinfinite-sse2*.rpm would not get automatically installed by
apt/yum etc.

If /usr/lib/sse2/*.so.* were part of i386-rpms, they would get
automatically installed on all ix86 systems and the dynamical linker
would have to decide on which library to use at run-time.

Ralf