Summary from yesterdays fesco meeting

[Dan Williams]

On Fri, 2006-02-17 at 20:39 +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>  * Kernel module standardization
>   * Should archs be hardcoded with a "ExclusiveArch: i586 i686 x86_64
> ppc" or similar entries? That's how it is done in beehive, but scop
> doesn't like that idea to much. Warren will ask dcbw if there are
> alternatives.

Warren poked me, here's my response:
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In the end, it might just be best to leave this up to the buildsystem,
since there's a "canonical" list of arches that a particular Distro
maintains.  There's two factors here:

1) The list of arches a _distro_ supports
2) The list of arches a particular package supports

The two are not identical.  And even though, for example, all of FC3 was
compiled for ppc internally, the original FC3 was not released for ppc
at all, and so therefore kernel modules should not be built for FC3/ppc
either.  Control over the package set that the distro supports is up to
the distro maintainers and the build system.

So what I think we should end up doing here is to:

a) Let packages do whatever the heck they want with their Exclusive,
Exclude, BuildArch tags, including using %{ix86} as Mike suggests
b) Have the buildsystem recognize kmod packages somehow (which we have
to do anyway), then filter kmod packages through a "supported" list of
sub-arches, including i586, i686, x86_64, ppc, athlon.  There's some
support for this already in the buildsystem.

This puts a minimum burden on maintainers since lots of this arch stuff
is black magic anyway, and should probably be kept in the same place.
The nobody gets confused about arches, and there doesn't need to be a
50ft long wiki page about it.

Of course, all this is completely separate from the whole
xen/hugemem/smp/up fiasco, and much simpler IMHO than those.

Let me know what you think.

Dan