Extras' plague-server and %{ix86}

[Dan Williams]

On Tue, 2005-12-27 at 16:36 +0330, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
> We are having a discussion on 
> 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=176434
> 
> about whether or not the Extras' plague-server will build i686,
> i586, ... versions of a package if the ExclusiveArch passed to it is
> %{ix86}, which according to my /usr/lib/rpm/macros will expand to the
> following:
> 
>    i386 i486 i586 i686 pentium3 pentium4 athlon
> 
> It seems that Thorsten's plague-server actually builds an i686 version
> of the package, while some packages in extras (like
> athcool-0.3.11-3.fc5) use the %{ix86} macro and were only built as i386
> in extras.
> 
> Would someone with more knowledge of Extras' plague-server enlighten us?

The buildsystem takes the "base arches" that a particular target can
build for (usually i386, x86_64, and ppc), grabs the 'buildarchs' RPM
tag from the SRPM, and filters the buildarchs through the "base arches"
for the target.  ExcludeArch and ExclusiveArch are taken into account.

It gets more complicated for subarchitectures though.  The buildsystem
has a feature called "optional arches" that packages can build for if
the specify it.  That could be set to 'i486 i586 i686', but then you'd
end up with 4 x86 versions of every package that gets pushed through the
buildsystem for those people that used %{ix86}.

We clearly don't want 5 different versions of FE, one each for each
architecture, because Core doesn't do that.  So its unclear to me how to
proceed with this.  There is another feature called "Additional Package
Arches" that allows other arches (like i686) on a per-package basis,
which might be the route to go.  But that feature requires server-side
configuration updates for each change, meaning that packages can't
control it.

Dan