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Re: noarching source packages


On 27/04/2017 18:53, Achim Gratz wrote:
Jon Turney writes:
Picking up the discussion from [1], I've been looking a bit at
noarching the source packages.

So, the first problem is that we don't really have source packages.

I'll use this occasion to raise the topic of the debuginfo packages
again.  I still think we should change their naming convention (or
alternatively the naming convention for the source packages) and a large

What is your reason for changing the name?

I was wondering if we need to explicitly identify debuginfo archives as a different kind of thing. Currently, debuginfo packages work just like any other install archive, which is fine, except for perhaps they need a separate filter in setup.

part of them is made up again of the source files, which should be
separated out into noarch also.

Nice idea, but the practicalities seem complex (e.g. generated source files needs to be treated correctly). In any case, this would seem to be a piece of work which falls after noarching the sources.

calm would need updating to look for packages in src/ as well as
noarch/ and <arch>/, and to emit 'Source:' rather than 'source:' lines
in setup.ini when the source is an actual source package.

I'd be hesitant to use yet another tree for this.  We already have way
too many directories that make up the repo.

'too many'? why?

It's not quite clear how to deal with making source packages.  If we
do it when we make the binary package (as now), then there is the near
certainly that the source package made for a different arch will
differ, gratuitously.

The only sane way is to mandate that the packages for all arches are
built together so that you can package the sources only once during the
packaging step.  Otherwise you either have to check that the contents

That would seem to require a cross-compilation environment for at least one cygwin arch, with all the dependencies available.

(ignoring the metadata that _will_ differ) is identical between the
source archives you've built seperately and then chose one of those for
upload or you'll have to force a reproducible build of the source
archive at least.

This also potentially loses information, as the maintainer might
adjust the .cygport to build on the 2nd architecture they try, but
those changes wouldn't be uploaded, (whereas currently the source
actually used for the build is uploaded)

It's easy enough to branch that decision inside the cygport file and the
only time I did that have passed now that the package content in both
arches is almost identical.  So is anybody really doing that currently?

At the moment, nothing prevents SRC_URI and PATCH_URI depending on the ARCH, so we just don't know.

But this is more a question of workflow: nothing stops the maintainer going back and changing the source package, then just rebuilding one architecture.

The ideal solution would be a build service which accepts a source package and produces the install archives, but I don't see that happening anytime soon...

But the real problem is that besides our own stuff some upstream sources
are archful.

Examples?

Applied retroactively, it looks like this would save about 13G (out of
a total mirror size of approximately 97G), but it seems that there are
many source packages which (usually spuriously) differ between arches,
so that saving wouldn't be immediately realized.

From my last dedup exercise (where my local Cygwin repo was around 80GB
since I don't mirror some of the cross-compilation and KDE packages)
doing the dedup on just the source and doc packages reduced the size of
the repo by 30GB.  I'll note again that if it was possible to split off
the noarch part of _all_ packages the gains would be larger than that.
The way it would work is that setup.exe should accept both noarch and
arch archives for the same package.  It would then proceed to first
install the noarch and then the arch part if it finds both of them.
Incidentally, this would keep the current tree structure intact and
allow us to freely move packages from arch to noarch and vice versa
between different releases with no manual intervention.

Great.  I look forward to reading the patches :)


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