noarch packages, was Re: [gentoo-dev] rfc: revisiting our stabilization policy

On Fri, 17 Jan 2014, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
>>>>>> On Fri, 17 Jan 2014, grozin  wrote:
>> Maybe, a good solution is to introduce a special arch, "noarch", for
>> such packages (similar to what's done in the rpm world). Then, if a
>> package is ~noarch, it is automatically considered ~arch for all
>> arches. Similar for stable. The maintainer should be able to keyword
>> ~noarch and to stabilize noarch. Comments?
>
> How would you handle dependencies in such a scenario? All dependencies
> must be keyworded or stable on all architectures, before the package
> can be keyworded or stabilised on noarch?
Many "pure data" packages don't depend on anything.

Pure TeX/LaTeX packages should be keyworded ~noarch only if a suitable 
binary TeX is keyworded for each arch. Hmm, this, probably, means that 
they can never be stabilized as noarch.

Pure python scripts (without library dependencies) should become ~noarch 
if some suitable python binary is keyworded for each arch. Similarly for 
perl, ruby. Python is installed on each Gentoo box anyway, so, in this 
case it is less problematic.

Andrey