Hi Ken,

> ...the tarball from one doesn't work on the other.

Can you be a little more specific as to what error/problem you encountered?

-- Michael

# Michael Doran, Systems Librarian
# University of Texas at Arlington
# 817-272-5326 office
# 817-688-1926 mobile
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# http://rocky.uta.edu/doran/
  

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On 
> Behalf Of Ken Irwin
> Sent: Tuesday, October 14, 2008 9:22 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: [CODE4LIB] another distribution question: 32- or 
> 64-bit tarballs
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> Thanks to everyone who responded last week about creating an 
> installation workflow. I've got that mostly sorted out, and 
> am on to the 
> next stage.
> 
> I thought it would be a simple matter to TAR up my pile of 
> files. But as 
> soon as I tried installing the package on a new server, I ran into 
> trouble: my library server is a 64-bit machine, and the 
> second server is 
> 32-bits. I normally consider that information to be 
> unimportant to daily 
> life (read: I really don't know or usually care...). But to 
> my surprise 
> that seems to mean that the tarball from one doesn't work on 
> the other.
> 
> Is this a common problem? Is there a way around it? Are 
> tarballs really 
> mutually unintelligible? I don't generally recall seeing two 
> versions of 
> software being distributed. Is there a standard approach to 
> dealing with 
> this? It's just a pile of text (php, sql, html) and image files -- 
> there's no compiled code of any sort. I would have thought it 
> was sort 
> of architecture-neutral. Except it seems that the packaging mechanism 
> itself is a problem.
> 
> I did check out the book Erik recommended: 
> http://producingoss.com/ to 
> see what it has to say about this matter; all it says is "Use 
> Tar!" with 
> no ambiguity about architecture. Is everyone in the world on 64-bit 
> architecture except this one test server that I have access to?
> 
> Any advice?
> 
> Thanks!
> Ken
> 
> -- 
> Ken Irwin
> Reference Librarian
> Thomas Library, Wittenberg University
>