[Slackbuilds-users] proposal to enable building scripts on ARM

[Erich Ritz]

------- Original Message -------
On Saturday, March 4th, 2023 at 9:25 AM, Willy Sudiarto Raharjo <willysr at slackbuilds.org> wrote:


> 
> 
> 
> > ARM isn't going away, and slackbuilds.org supporting at least a subset
> 
> > of scripts to be build on ARM would be really nice to have. I'm not
> > heavily invested in it, I just have some RPis with Slackware on it that
> > I occasionally use. Just sharing my thoughts, as it's a semi-frequently
> > discussed topic.
> > 
> > The main problem with allowing support for ARM is that the layout of
> > the info files would change, which could break tooling. I just had an
> > idea which wouldn't break any existing tools, but could enable
> > architecture specific information to be read by other tools (or
> > humans):
> > 
> > For each additional supported architecture other than x86 and x86_64 add
> > a file named ${PRGNAM}.${ARCH}info which add/override values of the
> > classic info file. The only additional change would be in the code to
> > detect architectures in the SlackBuilds, but that should be of no
> > relevance for tools.
> 
> 
> The problem is that we (admins) might not have a machine to test the ARM
> architecture, so we can't validate the script.
> Plus it adds more loads to the admins to validate over 8k scripts during
> development cycle for next release of SlackBuild repository.
> 
> We had issues with failing 32 bit builds for 15.0 since majority of
> users here are using 64 bit machines only and didn't test on 32 bit
> machines anymore so some goes undetected.

For my scripts I (most likely) won't test on ARM, but will gladly accept patches from ARM users to take care of any quirks.  I only manage 13 scripts (some of which are upstream binaries repackaged into Slackware format).  For the binary packages I would have no problem adding the appropriate "UNSUPPORTED" entries for ARM if we ever settle on a best practice of indicating ARM-specific download URLs (or the appropriate ARM URL if upstream supports it).

Also ARM users may want to rally together to provide an ARM branch similar to ponce's current repo.

Erich

> 
> 
> --
> Willy Sudiarto Raharjo
> 
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