[pacman-dev] $ARCH suffix on packages

Roman Kyrylych roman.kyrylych at gmail.com
Tue Oct 10 18:33:43 EDT 2006


As an ordinary user I must say that $ARCH suffix in package names is
_not_ needed IMHO. Why? Some of you say it will be usefull for people
who download packages for more then one arch and add them with pacman
-A. But is that _hard_ to keep them in different directories? Why then
we don't end with something like
modules-something-beyond-utils-0.15-7-i686-2.6.18-testing.pkg.tar.gz
for better seeing "at a glance" all info??? If going with that logic -
at least having -testing/{-curent/extra/}unstable is good for such
people who needs -i688/-x86_64, why don't add this too? >;-)

Seriously, _most_ people don't use multiple archs at once nor install
much packages with pacman -A nor keep a mirror of different archs in
one huge directory. Having some prefix is useful for them. They
_already_know_ for what arch  are packages they are installing.

IMHO adding $ARCH suffix will only complicate things. And will confuse
many users during transition period (which will last untill all
packages will got $ARCH suffix appended during version updates).

So, I don't see anything positive for _most_ users here.

-- 
Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)


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