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

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

Hamish Moffatt <hamish@debian.org> writes:

> On Fri, Jan 16, 2004 at 12:46:46PM +0100, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
> > Hamish Moffatt <hamish@debian.org> writes:
> > > I think if you only wanted to provide 32-bit libraries for compatibility
> > > with evil binary-only software, you could provide a libc6-32_amd64.deb,
> > > which might itself be built by an amd64-hosted i386-cross-compiler, if
> > > such a thing can be built.
> > 
> > But we want full compatibility. Amd64 uses its own packages in
> > parallel with existing binary-i386 packages. No need to compile them
> > again on amd64 and increase the archive size. Thats the goal.
> 
> Lots of people have posted to say they want a full amd64 distribution
> with everything recompiled, and I agree. So then apart from support for
> source-less i386 binaries, why do we need the ability to install i386
> packages?

If not for amd64 then for mips, sparc and ppc.

I don't consider "lets do something dirty and special for amd64" a
solution to the multiarch problem so I'm pretty much ignoring all
arguments starting with "But for amd64 ...".

Finding a solution for amd64 alone means the exact same problem
remains for the rest and then you have 3 different ways to support:
single arch, amd64 and general multiarch.

MfG
        Goswin