reusing machine independent packages? (was Re: Package binaries for NetBSD/arm 4.0 / pkgsrc-2008Q1)

["Jeremy C. Reed" <reed%reedmedia.net@localhost>]

On Tue, 28 Oct 2008, Havard Eidnes wrote:

> In the case of ec-fonts-mftraced, I admit to having cheated, and
> put a doctored package in place, since there's no MD binaries in
> that package.  However, the program which generates the fonts in
> this package is floating-point intensive, and therefore not
> exactly the best match for a shark with no floating-point unit.
> When I had to power the build host off for a local power outage,
> it would have had to start from scratch.
> 
> This particular build was done natively, the next one will use
> distcc, will use as many binary packages as possible from this
> build, and will be based on the pkgsrc-2008Q3 branch.

Do we have any pkgsrc variable that flags if a package is machine 
independent?

It may be useful for fonts, documentation, interpreted scripts, etc. to 
only build the package one time and then have just symlinks on the FTP 
server (and mirrors).

Then pkg_add should notice that too so doesn't complain about different 
platform.

May also want some (optional) way to check if the generic packages are 
already available and reuse (download and install) as needed for bulk 
builds.

And a bulk build could be done for only generic, machine independent 
packages (and their dependencies) and then upload only the machine 
independent packages.

Just some thoughts. What do you think?