i486 base architecture

[Jeff Johnson]

Nicholas Miell wrote:

>[ Stuff about what's going to 'Provide: cpu(cmov)' omitted. ]
>
>Ok, now that that's settled, how are packages going to get the
>"Requires: cpu(cmov)" dependency?
>  
>

Again, there's nothing (well you are gonna need a matching Provides: 
somehow) stopping
anyone from adding
    Requires: cpu(cmov)
to a package spec file, presumably because cmov is known to be used within
package executable.

The process can be done automagically as well, basically disassembling 
every elf
file and grepping for known i686 specific opcodes. That mechanism is crude
enough that perhaps some compiler geek would suggest a better mechanism
almost instantly ;-)

>And why can't we just say that i686 packages all require a i686 variant
>that provides CMOVcc?
>  
>

Because that is exactly where rpm is right now, with murky and implicit 
assumptions
about what is provided and what is not, and no clear way to identify without
the artifact of inventing bogus i686 arch names (kinda like ppc* is 
today, there's
way too many ppc* arches, and I certainly have no idea what 
distinguishing properties
each has, other than different letters after "ppc")

>Sure, there are i686 variants that don't, but what's stopping them from
>using the generic i386 version (which is optimized for i686, anyway)?
>  
>
And that is the lowest common denominator package naming that is 
currently being
used in FC4, some packages have ".i386.rpm" suffixes, yet will not run 
on hw arch i386,
causing user confision about every 3 months or so, and we discuss this 
topic Yet Again.

73 de Jeff