Re: Upcoming Debian multiarch support (amd64, sparc64, s390x, mips64) [affects sarge slightly]

[Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>]

Josselin Mouette <josselin.mouette@ens-lyon.org> writes:

> Le mar 13/01/2004 à 19:48, Goswin von Brederlow a écrit :
> > Everything else will most likely be ported to 64 bit at some stage. If
> > someone is willing to port something I see no reason to not include
> > the result in debian-amd64. Through that eventually everything of
> > intrest will be ported.
> 
> This is completely insane. If nothing is done without some interest from
> the maintainer, having packages ported will be a terrible pain. AMD64
> users will have to hurry hundreds of maintainers to make an effort for
> an arch they don't use, and it's not like there weren't any lazy
> maintainers.

Not only a maintainer can port a package. The chance that the
maintainer actually cares because he has an amd64 (or because he is so
nice) is still slim. But every single user can send a patch to the
BTS. And amd64 will become common enough in the near future that the
mass of users can force the maintainer to accept it or fork the
package as a last resort.

> > The problems are the same, the extend of the probems (amount of
> > packages affected) is different.
> 
> That's why we need a way to have all the archive rebuilt, not just a
> part of it. Without that, we won't have all packages built for amd64
> before several *years*.
> 
> Face it: as is, this port is useless.

As is is that we have multiarch support with renamed 64 bit library
packages. Its prefectly usable and apart from some radeon DRI module
for X everything works now. No package in Debian is known not to work
(any more than the BTS already says).

Thats the beauty of multiarch support. Package could be ported over
the next 100 years one by one and the system would still be usable at
any point. We certainly don't need to port everything before you can
call amd64 usable.

MfG
        Goswin