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

[B. Watson]

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:

"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.

This isn't ideal for aarch64 users (it makes aarch64 a "second class"
architecture), but it's better than not being supported at all.

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.

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.