On Fri, Sep 2, 2022 at 1:43 PM Richard Shaw <hobbes1069(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> If looking at a single package in isolation it may look wasteful, but from
> the POV of the distro as a whole packages with potential mingw sub-RPMs
> are a small subset of what goes through koji every day.
Perhaps, but the engineer in me finds this very distasteful :)
It would probably be too much work but it would be useful to have a pseudo-arch
"mingw" which would just build on the first available "noarch"
builder.
Building noarch subpackages on multiple architectures actually
provides some benefits, even if some - or all - of the output is
thrown away:
- architecture-specific bugs that result in generation of different
"noarch" subpackages get caught (which they wouldn't be if the
"noarch" subpackage were only ever built once)
- you can run tests for the functionality that's provided by the
"noarch" subpackages on different architectures
- etc.
For example, all Rust library packages build only "noarch"
subpackages, but the packages themselves are built on *all*
architectures, because we want to know whether the shipped code
actually *compiles* and tests *succeed* on all supported
architectures. If we didn't do that, catching architecture-specific
bugs would be much harder, and would only result in random problems,
or build failures in leaf *application* packages instead of in the
package that actually has the problem.
I might remember wrong, but doing the same for Python packages was
thought about a few years ago to catch architecture-specific issues
more consistently (and not only iff the noarch python package happens
to randomly be built on the failing architecture every now and then).
Fabio