[Fedora-packaging] To noarch or arch for arch specific script packages?

[Michael Schwendt]

On Wed, 12 Jul 2006 08:02:46 -0400, Jesse Keating wrote:

> On Wednesday 12 July 2006 06:14, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> > Else it would be abuse of tags. The only vaguely valid case is combining
> > BuildArch noarch and ExcludeArch, which is like saying "by nature, the
> > package contents are arch-independent, but we know that there is a problem
> > on the N excluded archs".
> 
> How far do you take this though?
> 
> ExcludeArch: ppc ppc64 s390 s390x alpha sparc sparc64 ia64 arm .....
> 
> It starts to get silly when you have to guess at the arches that somebody may 
> attempt to install your package for.

No, it is silly to not make the package arch-specific in that case.

Your package excludes almost a dozen archs => it is not arch-independent!

> Why would 'ExcludeArch' be ok, 
> but 'ExclusiveArch' not be? 

I tried to explain this in my previous reply.

ExcludeArch => we know about problems with the explicitly excluded archs,
we assume the package is okay for all other archs

> ExclusiveArch says "I know it _only_ works here, 
> nowhere else." 

Then it is NOT noarch.

> where as ExcludeArch would be "These are the arches out in the 
> world  I know of, and I know it doesn't work there."

Once more, ExcludeArch and ExclusiveArch are NOT information that
can be found in the .noarch package.

> I agree that we are overloading the tag.  But if we're going to ban one 
> method, we should ban them all and make it a hard rule that if your noarch 
> code only works on specific arches, make it an arch specific package.

Exactly.