From the diary of AArch64 porter — rpm packaging

This post is part 2 of the "From the diary of AArch64 porter" series:

In previous part I wrote about code managing issues. Today I want to write more about packaging and other ugly things.

Each time I see block with check for 32/64 architecture I want to scream. Funny part is in RPM packaging. For example:

%ifarch x86_64 ppc64 s390x sparc64
%define bitsize 64
%else
%define bitsize 32
%endif

Can be replaced with simple “%define bitsize %__isa_bits” so we would not have to patch yet another spec file.

But developers are smart — always can create some nice way of fsck such thing up…

if test $ax_arch = x86_64 -o $ax_arch = ppc64 -o $ax_arch = s390x -o $ax_arch = sparc64; then
    libsubdirs="lib64 lib lib64"
fi

This is from configure of one of libraries which failed to find boost version (as it did it by scanning library paths).

Such issues are fun. Especially when component builds fine with wrong value and then all packages which depend on it fail in some weird way.

But sometimes they fail in a way that it is cleanly visible what was wrong. ORBit2 is good example:

DEBUG: /usr/include/orbit-2.0/orbit/orbit-config.h:9:30: fatal error:
orbit-config-64.h: No such file or directory

Everyone see that something is fishy with ORBit2 here. One small patch (similar to %ifarch example) and then all it’s dependencies build just fine.

So if you are software developer and have such 32/64 checks in your software please consider doing it in a way that another 64bit architecture will not have to patch your code again.

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