On Sat, 23 Dec 1995, Ian Murdock wrote: > I've created binary-alpha and binary-sparc directories under the > development tree. They're both empty at the moment, of course, but > they're ready for use whenever the development teams have something > to put there. > > (BTW, I plan to rename binary to binary-i386 as soon as we finish the > planned FTP reorganization.)
It seems that the Guidelines document needs updating to address issues falling out of this. One issue is whether binary packages are to be distinguished by distribution-specific naming convention (and, if so, what that convention is to be). Binary packages will need need distinguishing names if they're to be uploaded to a common Incoming directory. Will debian systems offer cross-compilation facilities? Will the developer of a sparc-targeted package be expected to provide an i386 build as well? If not, and some other developer provides the i386-targeted package, which of the two source packages (which may differ from one another) will be in the distribution? It seems to me that packages will need a primary maintainer, who would be responsible for the source package, and an architecture specific maintainer for each supported binary package. One person could act in all capacities, of course, but I'd expect that at least some packages would have different maintainers for the different architectures. The way I see this working, architecture-specific maintainers with the ability to address architecture-specific bug reports and do architecture-specific testing would feed architecture-specific fixes and patches to the primary package maintainer. Primary package maintainers having, say, a sparc would install alpha or i386 patches blindly, relying on the testing done by the alpha and i386 maintainers, and issue a package revision update.
