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Alexey Eremenko wrote:
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Alexey Eremenko <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Date: Apr 19, 2006 4:48 PM
> Subject: Attention: Lots of SUSE packages are packaged incorrect
> To: [email protected]
> I would like to discuss with the SUSE community one mistake commonly
> done by SUSE packagers: more specifically - the RPM architecture in
> SUSE.
> I have found a LOT of noarch packages built for the i586 architecture
> in SUSE Linux 10.0.
> I propose to people to identify those packages, that should be made
> "noarch" but for some obscure reason are not.

Let me guess, python and perl packages ? :)

> Most packages that were built in the incorrect way were documentation,
> but some others were written in Interpreted languages. (like Python)
> One example of interpreted language package that is i586 but should be
> noarch is :
> "eric" IDE
> I have not dive too deep, but I'm sure there are other examples.
> The other incorrectly packaged packages are docs - quick search returns me:

Indeed you have not "dive too deep".

While most of those packages only contain interpreted bytecode (or plain
source),
1) some also contain compiled code (e.g. _xxx.so or .pyo for Python)
2) they are installed into an arch-specific subdirectory, namely
/usr/lib/python/site-packages
on i586, and
/usr/lib64/python/site-packages
on x86_64

Same goes for Perl. That's the reason why they are arch-specific.

And if you ask yourself (or us) "but why ?", it's because those
directories may also contain compiled code.

> linux:/mnt/cdrom/suse/i586 # ls | grep doc | sort | cat -n
>      1  apache2-doc-2.0.54-10.i586.rpm
>      2  atk-doc-1.10.3-2.i586.rpm

And that's because with RPM, you can only define the architecture for
the whole spec file, which includes the main package and all the
subpackages.

You cannot define a subpackage (e.g. foo-doc) to have another
architecture than the main package (foo).

...
> now, 33 doc packages are i386 ? And, of course all of them contain
> binaries, huh!
> :)
> Look, it wastes time & server space to get noarch packges built for
> different platforms.
> 
> Why is this ?

Please buy yourself a clue before starting to flame.

cheers
- --
  -o) Pascal Bleser     http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/
  /\\ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>       <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
 _\_v The more things change, the more they stay insane.
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