At Tue, 14 Oct 2008 10:21:59 -0400,
Ken Irwin <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> 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?

There is no difference between tar files created on 32 bit or 64 bit
machines. There can be differences between GNU tar & (for instance)
solaris tar. What problem are you having specifically?

best,
Erik Hetzner



;; Erik Hetzner, California Digital Library
;; gnupg key id: 1024D/01DB07E3