[Slackbuilds-users] About aarch64 support support in TEMPLATE.info

[David Chmelik]

On 4/15/25 8:08 PM, B. Watson wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Apr 2025, Willy Sudiarto Raharjo wrote:
>> 3. More burden for maintainers and admins if this is added into the 
>> template since they need to test more
>> 4. We don't have the CI support as of now for AARCH64, only relies to 
>> the current maintainer that they test it.
>
> These could be addressed like so, in the site FAQ:
exactly

> "aarch64 is unsupported by the SBo team, though it may be supported
> by individual maintainers. Please contact the maintainer if you have
> problems with a build on aarch64."
>
> When a maintainer gets contacted, it's up to him to either fix the
> problem for the aarch64 user, or say "Sorry, I don't have time to
> support aarch64, could you send me a patch?"... and if the user
> sends a patch, the maintainer can add it to the build. If not, the
> maintainer can at least put "This doesn't work on aarch64" in his
> README, to save other aarch64 users from wasting time.
sounds good

> This isn't ideal for aarch64 users (it makes aarch64 a "second class"
> architecture), but it's better than not being supported at all.
That's what *BSD UNIX does: NetBSD even has 50 'tier 2' architectures 
(FreeBSD has over 10 tier 2, and one tier 3) and I think it works fine.

> Point 4 (the CI thing) could exist someday, even though it doesn't now.
>
>> 5. Changes needed in our backend infrastructure (website, database, 
>> etc) and so far no one is interested to take this work.
>
> This could be simpler than you think. Basically, all that's needed for
> *minimal* aarch64 support would be to allow the DOWNLOAD_aarch64 and
> MD5SUM_aarch64 keys in the .info file... and *ignore* them. The script
> that reads .info files and populates the database would just have to
> allow these keys to exist in the file, but not do anything with them.
>
> The rest of the site wouldn't need changing, and neither would the
> database.
>
> The end result would be, aarch64 download URLs wouldn't be shown
> on the site, but they would be in the .info files. If you went to
> http://slackbuilds.org/repository/15.0/<category>/<build>/ in a
> browser, you would only see the x86 and x86_64 downloads listed
> "Source Downloads". You could click on the .info file under
> "Individual Files" to see the aarch64 download/md5.
Is it possible to put DOWNLOAD_aarch64 & MD5SUM_aarch64 on-site but not 
officially test build until enough team members are involved?  Often I 
search website for download URLs, though I only have two older Raspberry 
Pi (RPi) Slackware servers, I'm reorganizing---not currently using--but 
maybe this or next decade I'll have a Slackware ARM laptop.

> I could make this change without too much trouble (it's just
> scripting, not rocket science). DOWNLOAD_aarch64 and MD5SUM_aarch64
> would be optional (the database script wouldn't require them to be
> present even if empty).
>
> Tools like sbopkg and sbotools don't use the website. They just look
> at the .info file. They'd just have to be modified to look in the
> .info file for the aarch64 URL and md5sum, when running on aarch64.
> Someone who isn't me is welcome to do that part.
On that topic, sbopkg should be on website, because sbotools, etc., are, 
and the rest can self-update from it, so sbopkg should, especially since 
sbopkg isn't truly 'third-party' for some years rather than being 
maintained by a SlackBuilds.org team member.