[Popcon-developers] popcon and multiarch

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

[Bill Allombert]
> Hello Petter and other interested people,
> 
> We need to adapt popcon for multiarch.  Do you have experience with
> multiarch ?

I have no experience with multiarch so far.

> We need to decide how popcon will handle it, in particular what to do
> when a package is installed for two different architectures, and how
> we set the ARCH field.

I guess we might need to change the format, and provide information on
all archietectures of installed packages.  The collector then need to
cope with the fact that a machine can use more than one architecture.
No idea how to best do this.

Perhaps several sections, one for each architecture, ie something like
this:

POPULARITY-CONTEST-0 TIME:1332485262 ID:283496b6f33069fb335513f4000b9cae ARCH:x86_64 POPCONVER:1.49
1332485259 1327819531 perl-base /usr/bin/perl
1332485251 1329500595 libc6 /lib/ld-2.11.3.so
END-POPULARITY-CONTEST-0 TIME:1332485262
POPULARITY-CONTEST-0 TIME:1332485262 ID:283496b6f33069fb335513f4000b9cae ARCH:i386 POPCONVER:1.49
1332485251 1329500595 libc6 /lib/ld-2.11.3.so
END-POPULARITY-CONTEST-0 TIME:1332485262

I did not look up the correct multiarch paths for the given packages in
this example.  The point is that we provide several blocks in the same
report, one for each architecture used on the given machine.  It would
allow the receiving end to work with very little changes.  Arch all
packages would only be reported in the 'native' arch block, and all the
extra binary packages would be reported in their own block.
-- 
Happy hacking
Petter Reinholdtsen