[gentoo-dev] ARCH awareness checklist

[Mark Guertin]

Hello Everyone

Just wanted to post a quick list of some potential problem causing factors for 
ARCH awareness in portage, it will be a quick (and definately not all 
inclusive) list of some potential things to watch out for.  Not all of these 
will apply once the new keyword and ARCH related portage tweaks, but 
a lot are good 'rules of thumb' in making ARCH safe builds.

1) When adding any sort of patch or modified/sed'ed Makefiles:
  - If it is needed for a specific ARCH related issue, please setup
    so that it only get's applied to the ARCH in question.
  - grep for anything like 386, 686, x86 in the patches/diff/Makefiles,
    if they exist thing will most likely not work on other ARCHes, so
    again please at least initially wrap an ARCH check around these.
  - if a patch/Makefile is a global fix please give us ppc devs a
    chance to take a quick look at it before unmasking to the world
    where possible.  I would say that 40-50% of the bugs I fix are 
    related to this sort of issue.

2) When adding new builds to portage some things to watch out for:
  - if the pkg contains any amounts of asm (assembly) it will most
    certainly not work on all ARCHes unless there is specific options
    in configure for said ARCH.
  - If in doubt about it again I (and any other ppc devs) would be
    more than happy to at least take a 30 second look at the build 
    to look for potential hiccups/issues for ARCH before release.
  - if the build is definately not ARCH safe, please mask it (or ask
    a ppc dev) to mask it in our profile (at least until portage takes
    care of this for us).  Users will try to install anything they can get
    their hands on ;)

3)  Adding deps to existing builds
  -  this one has cause a lot of broken things in the non x86 world as
     well.  A quick look at /usr/portage/profiles/default-ppc-1.0/packages
     will show any non ppc functional builds right near the top.  There is
     better functionality for this via portage on the way, but right now there
     is no real elegant solution :(
  -  Again if in doubt I don't mind harboring any questions anyone may
     have in a timely manner via email or IRC :)

Thanks for taking the time to read this, and thanks to some of the devs who 
have been working with us to be ARCH happy.  Again some of this may not apply 
when newer portage takes over (like the adding new builds getting opened to 
the wild without masking), but at least this gives devs something to work 
from to be more ARCH concious.  These little checks on ebuilds will make life 
a lot smoother for non x86 Gentoo users and devs.

Thanks

Mark (Gerk)