Athlon Incompatible Packages

[Mike A. Harris]

On Mon, 23 Feb 2004, Warren Togami wrote:

>> Is there any reason why those packages restrict arch to 386 and are not
>> compatible with athlon, or is that a bug? I'd like to be able to rebuild
>> them. Would you like me to file a bugzilla on each one?
>>
>> syslinux-2.08-2.src.rpm
>> system-config-boot-0.2.1-1.1.src.rpm
>> system-config-netboot-0.1.3-2.1.src.rpm
>
>This has been repeated many times in the past.  The vast majority of
>software have zero or negligible performance benefit from compiling to
>athlon.  The compiler flags used to build all packages are already set for
>i686 optimization.  Generally it is a very inefficient use of time to
>rebuild packages for your specific arch as it takes far more time to do so
>than any speed benefit you will gain.  This being said however, nothing
>stops you from taking the SRPMS and doing what you wish to them.  You have
>the freedom of choice with Open Source.

While I certainly agree with your prognosis that most software 
will not at all benefit by being recompiled with --target=athlon, 
I totally disagree with you that the problem being reported is 
not a real issue.

Looking at the package list, my assumption is that all of the 
above packages have a hard coded:

Exclusivearch: i386

or similar in them, and do not add the athlon architecture there.  
It is most likely an oversight on the part of the package 
maintainer than any attentional blocking of the ability to 
recompile it for athlon architecture.


>I would suggest against reporting this kind of "problem" to Bugzilla as
>there are already thousands real issues there that are actual problems.

And I would advise otherwise.  Unless there is a specific reason 
that a package forcibly denies the ability to be rebuilt on the 
athlon architecture, then there should be no restriction on doing 
so if someone desires to do so.

If anyone finds a package that wont rebuild with --target=athlon, 
I suggest filing a bug in bugzilla.  It is VERY unlikely that 
fixing the problem takes more than 2 minutes for the given 
package, and is probably a one line edit of the spec file.

After I send this email, I will have a look at some of the 
packages spec files, and commit fixes to any simple problems I 
find.



-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat