(Crosspost to -alpha and -sparc removed.) Bill Mitchell writes ("Re: binary-alpha and binary-sparc directories"): > It seems that the Guidelines document needs updating to address > issues falling out of this. > > One issue is whether binary packages are to be distinguished by > distribution-specific naming convention (and, if so, what that > convention is to be). Binary packages will need need distinguishing > names if they're to be uploaded to a common Incoming directory.
As Matt Bailey suggests, I think separate Incoming directories is a better solution. If we encode the architecture into the filename it will become excessively long, and directory listings will contain much useless junk. > Will debian systems offer cross-compilation facilities? Will > the developer of a sparc-targeted package be expected to provide > an i386 build as well? If not, and some other developer provides > the i386-targeted package, which of the two source packages (which > may differ from one another) will be in the distribution? Debian packages can't (in general) be cross-compiled for different architectures. We can't make a requirement that this should be possible, because not all upstream source could be made to meet it. I expect that most packages would have a `primary' Debian maintainer, and that people doing ports would just upload binaries. If they need to make changes to the source they will have to work closely with the `primary' maintainer to ensure that all the sources are kept in step. > It seems to me that packages will need a primary maintainer, who > would be responsible for the source package, and an architecture > specific maintainer for each supported binary package. One person > could act in all capacities, of course, but I'd expect that at least > some packages would have different maintainers for the different > architectures. > > The way I see this working, architecture-specific maintainers with > the ability to address architecture-specific bug reports and do > architecture-specific testing would feed architecture-specific > fixes and patches to the primary package maintainer. Primary > package maintainers having, say, a sparc would install alpha > or i386 patches blindly, relying on the testing done by the > alpha and i386 maintainers, and issue a package revision update. Yes. Ian.