On Thu, 2010-07-08 at 08:04 +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
On 07/08/2010 06:59 AM, Panu Matilainen wrote:
On Thu, 8 Jul 2010, James Antill wrote:
On Wed, 2010-07-07 at 21:50 -0400, Braden McDaniel wrote:
Well, with respect to what to do about a guideline for BuildRequires and %{?_isa}, I'm back to being confused.
Matthias' comment suggests to me that %{?_isa} should be recommended in BuildRequires for non-noarch packages; but the ensuing discussion makes me less certain of that. The result of this uncertainty is that I'm back to thinking that mention of BuildRequires should be dropped from this draft and its issues deferred to another one.
_isa in BuildRequires doesn't work atm. and shouldn't be used. There are possible fixes, but all of them are non-trivial.
"Doesn't work" is, err, rather vague.
ISA in BuildRequires works just fine (buildsys and all). BUT using it in Fedora infrastructure breaks the SRPM repository& its users (like yum-builddep) which are built under the assumption SRPMs are arch-independent.
Explicit %_isa in any "*requires:" breaks updates when a package changes its architecture (noarch <-> "arch").
This strikes me as an uncommon (if not rare) occurrence. Nonetheless...
If your package changes from noarch -> arch, the potential to maintain compatibility with dependents (without a rebuild) is highly suspect. Regardless, this is a situation that must be coordinated with downstream packages.
Changing from arch -> noarch probably stands a better chance of not introducing breakage on its own; especially if the "arch"-ness was a mistake or happenstance (e.g., the introduction of noarch subpackages gave us some such transitions). In cases where "arch"-ness is a mistake or happenstance, the recommendations in this draft do not advise dependents to use arch-specific Requires.
If there were a real transition of a *library or -devel* package from being arch-specific to arch-independent, once again I am very doubtful that compatibility with dependents could be maintained.