Re: cpu feature dependencies? (was: Re: Migration to Pentium?)

[Samuel Hocevar <sam@zoy.org>]

On Tue, Jan 23, 2001, Arthur Korn wrote:
 
> IMO the way to go is what libc, mpg123 and probably other
> packages already do -- provide optimized versions of some
> binaries where it _really_ makes a difference (usually because
> CPU specific features like vector units are used). It would be
> great if this could be handled automatically by apt/dpkg with
> some kind of subarchitectures/pseudo-dependencies on processor
> features.
> 
> (ie
> Package: mpg123-3dnow
> Depends: libc6 (>= 2.1.97), mmx, 3dnow
> )

   I think this should rather be handled either by dlopen()ing the right
shared object containing optimized code, or by using the libc's own way
of handling it. Adding an extra package and CPU dependencies would lead
to all sorts of issues when changing the host's CPU, for instance.

Sam.
-- 
Samuel Hocevar <sam@zoy.org> <http://sam.zoy.org/>
for DVDs in Linux screw the MPAA and ; do dig $DVDs.z.zoy.org ; done | \
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