i486 base architecture

[Jeff Johnson]

Nicholas Miell wrote:

>On Wed, 2004-12-01 at 12:07 -0500, Jeff Johnson wrote:
>  
>
>>OK, to summarize:
>>
>>    a) There's a whole lot of pain and not much gain messing with 
>>package file names (and file paths and scripts and ... )
>>    b) The dependency
>>            Requires: cpu(cmov)
>>         (or equivalent token) might (*will* imho) be useful identifying 
>>packages that actually use, say, cmov.
>>        (Note: there's more than cmov that needs marking, generalizing 
>>the cpu(...) name space is quite straightforward.)
>>    c) Users want a clear call on what package file name to install, as 
>>some *.i386.rpm will not run on arch i386, very confusing.
>>    d) linuxthreads needs to die! die! die! (but that's just me ;-)
>>
>>Name your poison (if any) please.
>>    
>>
>
>What's going to Provide: cpu(cmov)?
>  
>

Can be done by simple string in per-arch kernel package right now, although
that doesn't really solve the problem adequately, as dependencies in 
packages
are static content. But even a static dependency would be as good as, say
    Provides: kernel-abi = 2.6

Prolly the strongest mechanism is to attach a run-time probe dependency 
to the "cpu(...)"
name space and parse /proc/cpuinfo for the relevant info. That mostly 
works, but
will have problems in chroot's w/o /proc mounted, and will be kinda 
weird if/when, say,
the mobo or disk is moved amongst machines, to mention just 2 possible 
problems off
the top of my head.

I suspect those deficiencies can be lived with, and are no worse than 
existing arch based tests.

It's not like a missing dependency is gonna explode somebody's monitor 
or anything
really seriously deadly or risky ... NPTL was far far riskier than what 
I am humbly proposing ;-)

73 de Jeff