Athlon Incompatible Packages

[Mike A. Harris]

On Tue, 24 Feb 2004, Tom Diehl wrote:

>> > This has been repeated many times in the past.  The vast majority of
>> > software have zero or negligible performance benefit from compiling to
>> > athlon.  The compiler flags used to build all packages are already set for
>> > i686 optimization.  Generally it is a very inefficient use of time to
>> > rebuild packages for your specific arch as it takes far more time to do so
>> > than any speed benefit you will gain.  This being said however, nothing
>> > stops you from taking the SRPMS and doing what you wish to them.  You have
>> > the freedom of choice with Open Source.
>> > 
>> > I would suggest against reporting this kind of "problem" to Bugzilla as
>> > there are already thousands real issues there that are actual problems.
>> 
>> I think you're avoiding my question, which is whether this is a bug or 
>> not. It seems to me though, that this is a bug... and all bugs have to 
>> be fixed, correct? As far as the real issues go, I'll get to those 
>> too... - I have 67 additional packages that will not build on fedora.
>
>Why would you think it was a bug? AFAIK, it is done on purpose. As you quoted
>above there are no signifigant performance gains to be realized by doing that
>and it would be a lot of work to do that and maintain it. IOW the cure is worse
>than the disease.

It depends on _why_ the package fails.  My unconfirmed assumption 
is that most of them are due to broken Exclusivearch being used 
in spec files, that does not use %{ix86}.

If an excludearch can be fixed to build athlon packages, and 
the compile succeeds after doing so, it is a bug that should IMHO 
be fixed, and takes next to zero effort on the part of the 
package maintainer.

If, on the other hand, a package fails to compile when using 
--target=athlon somewhere in the actual compilation (rather than 
rpm refusing to build it), then it might take more than a one 
line fix to fix it, and in this case the package owner may very 
well not want to bother looking into the issue themselves.  If 
that turns out to be the case however, Fedora Project is an open 
project and volunteers are more than welcome to submit patches 
that make athlon recompiled packages compile properly if they 
desire.

I don't think anyone should oppose volunteer contributions of 
patches to fix things.



-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat