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Diffstat (limited to 'README')
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@@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +This package ensures that the machine has required CPU facilities; users who +attempt installation on an inadequate processor will receive an error message +in preinst. This is useful if there's no way to make your package support +the base ISA for the architecture. + +While in general packages are required to at least try, there are situations +when baseline support is infeasible or a pure waste of time. No one is +going to run scientific number-crunching software on a pre-SSE2/SSE3 +machine. Or upstream code may use such extensions unconditionally, and +you don't have the resources to fix that yourself. + +You should also consider how likely other software is to use your package. +A fast strong hash is something with many uses, big and small, so it's a +priority to port libraries like libhighwayhash to all CPUs. On the other +hand, a niche piece of software is unlikely to be repurposed for other uses. + + +The check is skipped in two cases: +* when the target architecture is not executable at all (an ARM SoC mounted + into an amd64 machine, etc) +* when ISA_IGNORE environment variable has a non-empty value |