Separate architecture-independant package? (was: Re: Package binaries for NetBSD/macppc 3.1_STABLE / pkgsrc-2007Q1)

["Loic Hoguin" <essen%dev-extend.eu@localhost>]

On Fri, 11 May 2007 00:23:13 +0200, Havard Eidnes <he%NetBSD.org@localhost> 
wrote:

> be usable on 3.1 and probably on 3.0 as well.  For the packages which
> are not architecture-specific (should be the vast majority), these
> packages should also be usable on other powerpc ports.

Hello,

Just a thought but wouldn't it be good to separate architecture-independant
(the correct wording here might be "port-independant") packages (probably
all interpreted ones like pear packages or shell scripts) from  
architecture-
specific ones? Not separate in the tree, but maybe add or set a variable
that would indicate so.

This would be a small improvement for bulk build, since we could compile
architecture-specific packages only, do not duplicate packages if it do
not change between the various architectures, and win some time and space
because we don't package them for each arch. The user could also know if
he can directly use the package he already made or if he needs to rebuild
one for a new arch.

This is also probably easy to implement (but certainly not fun to add a
variable like this to all packages :).

Regards,

--
Loïc Hoguin
Dev:Extend