On Fri, Dec 29, 2023 at 03:20:45PM -0600, Chris Adams wrote:
> Once upon a time, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek <zbys...@in.waw.pl> said:
> > But building packages is just one thing. Those packages would need
> > to be distributed, causing additional load on mirrors and archives.
> > Our mirrors would not be keen on seeing this increase.
> 
> You're adding binaries, so you're either increasing the size of existing
> packages or adding alternate packages.  The size increase will be there
> either way; the difference is that with separate packages, not everybody
> will be downloading all the content (so easier on the mirrors than just
> bigger packages containing multiple binaries).
> 
> So if distribution is a concern, separate packages is a plus, not a
> minus.

We don't have a mechanism in dnf/rpm to mix & match, i.e. to select
from one microarchitecture if available and from a different one
otherwise. So if we were to provide e.g. a -v2 variant, then it'd
have to provide _all_ packages.

In the proposed scheme, we only provide additional packages for select
packages.

> > And then there's a question of how those packages would be consumed:
> > firstly, the installer would need to be modified to pick the variant
> > at installation time, and secondly, such an installation could never
> > be used with a different CPU, the initial choice would be locked in.
> 
> It's not like we haven't had this before.  Yes, it was annoying, but it
> wasn't THAT big of an issue.

There is certainly more than one way to skin this particular cat.

I don't expect most users to know which microarchitectures are supported
by their CPU. We are always trying to make the installer as simple as
possible so we shouldn't add a very complex technical question.
One of the advantages of the proposed scheme is that we should be able
to make it work transparently and automatically for the end users.

I know that my approach is different then what other distros have
tried: CentoOS/RHEL simply upgraded to a higher baseline and lost
support for some CPUs, OpenSUSE/Ubuntu/Arch provide alternative repos
which need to be explicitly selected by users. If the proposal gets
accepted, we will be able to compare.

Zbyszek
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