Re: Concerns about AMD64 port
On Thu, Feb 05, 2004 at 09:55:58AM -0500, Stephen Frost wrote:
> * John Goerzen (jgoerzen@complete.org) wrote:
> > On the AMD64 Ports page[1], it says "a pure 64bit port seems to be
> > academical and of little use." I am totally shocked by that statement.
>
> You're not the only one, believe me. I was too, and still don't agree
> with it.
Good. :-)
> > So it seems to me that the great benefit to many people of having a
> > native 64-bit userland has been sacrificed for the questionable benefit
> > of being able to run proprietary software without making a chroot. I am
> > still a little shocked about that.
>
> Supporting a 64bit userland is one of the goals, of course.
You'll forgive me for being fooled by the ports page, I hope :-)
> 1) RH/SuSe have a /lib with 32bit libraries and a /lib64 with 64bit
> libraries on their amd64 systems.
> 2) The FHS (I think?) and/or other standards groups are putting in their
> standards that the 32bit loader is to be at /lib/ld-linux.so and the
> 64bit loader at /lib64/ld-linux-amd64.so (or whatever the specific
> names are).
> 3) Debian wants to be standards compliant, of course.
> 4) Installing 64bit libraries to /lib64 is pretty difficult just to
> begin with and have everything work under Debian with the automated
> build systems and whatnot.
Ah ha. That makes some sense at least. And yet, at the same time, how
are RH and Gentoo doing it?
(Incidentally, what about /usr/lib?)
Heck, by modifying autoconf and debhelper to dump libs at the right
spot, we'd probably get 90% of the packages right off the bat.
> 5) RH/SuSe are (at least trying to) supporting mixed 32/64bit amd64
> systems, doing it on Debian would be good too.
> 6) Doing a 64bit-only port *now* and a mixed 32bit/64bit port *later*
> would make for a very difficult upgrade path (personally I'm inclined
> to say forget the upgrade path, make a 64bit only port *now* so
> people have a *useful* 64bit system and do the mixed stuff and tell
> people they need to reinstall if they want to go to the mixed
> system, and make it clear up front that if they do use the 64bit only
> port that they'll have to reinstall later if they want to move to the
> 32/64bit mixed system).
Exactly. I agree with that.
> 7) There's been claims that the RM or the ftp-master or someone wouldn't
> create the amd64 directory for a 64bit only port. No clue how
> reliable these are, people couldn't point me to specific messages in
> archives or anything, or give any better wording/reasoning than what
> I've said above.
>
> If you've got the time/resources to do a 64bit-only port and maintain it
> and can convince whomever to give you wanna-build access so that you can
> keep it up with the rest of unstable I'd say go for it. I'd even be
One does not have to have permission to run an autobuilder; permission
is only needed if it will be part of the official build infrastructure.
As an example, I right now am running an unofficial autobuilder for the
netbsd-i386 port. I grabbed the source for wanna-build, buildd, and
sbuild, and installed it on my box. I'm putting my packages up on
people.debian.org, which has a big disk and fast connection.
-- John
Reply to: