Segfaults on powerpc platform

[Panu Matilainen]

On Thu, 26 Apr 2007, Panu Matilainen wrote:
>
> Just so you know where this is going: that'll only tell me if it's somehow 
> related to rpmdb handling or a generic problem (I suspect the later) on 
> ppc64, not do anything about the problem itself. Frankly, I don't have a clue 
> what the actual problem might be. In any case this is just the tip of the 
> iceberg for ppc64 problems, at the moment you're probably better of having it 
> crash than actually do something :)
>
> /me wanders into apt-rpm multilib la-la-land...
> For one, apt gets the preferred architecture wrong on ppc64 where you 
> generally want 32bit packages with the exception of kernel and some other 
> bits. Means it ends up renaming the majority of packages to <name>.32bit 
> (which has it's own issues) when it should be renaming the 64bit stuff 
> instead to keep the breakage to minimum.
> Would help testing if it was runtime configurable instead of hardwired... 
> guess I should make it configurable anyway.

BTW this has now been done in git-HEAD, and should make ppc64 behave a bit 
more sensibly: It's possible to set a preferred arch for a given base 
architecture, so instead of 90% of packages getting renamed to .32bit, on 
ppc64 (and sparc64) the few 64bit packages are renamed to .64bit while 
leaving the rest alone.

Nothing has been done about the segfault as such, as I still have no idea 
where it's coming from but IF it's somehow related to the ridiculous 
amount of .32bit "compat" package renames.. it just might help anyway.

If you want to try it out in a safe manner (without overwriting installed 
version binaries etc), you can do this:
$ git clone http://apt-rpm.org/scm/apt.git
$ cd apt
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr --libdir=/usr/lib64 && make
$ su
# cp etc/multilib.conf /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/
# cd cmdline
# ./apt-get <..do stuff>

 	- Panu -