multiarch status update

[Matt Taggart and others <taggart@debian.org>]

Hi debian-devel,

For a couple years now a few of us have been talking about an idea called 
"multiarch". This is a way to seamlessly allow support for multiple different 
binary targets on the same system, for example running both i386-linux-gnu and 
amd64-linux-gnu binaries on the same system (many other working combinations 
exist as well). I have created a new page in the wiki to track info and status

  http://wiki.debian.org/multiarch

Recently HP and Canonical Ltd. have been looking into possible implementation 
strategies and this has resulted in the following report

  http://multiarch.alioth.debian.org/multiarch-hp-report.pdf

One of the things that came out of that report is that implementing multiarch 
would be much easier if we had a few enhancements in the package manager. This 
prompted Scott James Remnant to start working on a "dpkg 2.0" design document. 
That has been sent to the debian-dpkg list and is available at

  http://lists.debian.org/debian-dpkg/2006/05/msg00022.html

(please direct any followup about dpkg there)

Multiarch will allow Debian to

* better support systems that can run multiple binary targets, like
  i386 on amd64, i386 on ia64.
* better support MMX/SSE/Altivec/etc tuned packages
* allow for seamless large ABI transitions
* allow users to smoothly migrate from one arch to another
* do things like "partial architectures" so that we can add weird
  processor variants without needing to add an entire new port to the
  pool/mirrors
* better assimilate the *BSD kernels and userspaces
* better support non-monopoly archs, since they may be able to run bits
  for other archs
* maybe even to do stuff like use non-native archs (with support for
  other binary targets) to build native bits (m68k emulator on
  superfast amd64?). 
* other cool stuff

We think multiarch can be implemented with minimal disruption to unstable, 
most changes won't effect "single-arch" type systems at all. We'd like to 
start working on implementing it, but before we do we wanted to get feedback, 
concerns, recommendations, volunteers :), etc. This is a big undertaking and 
we're going to need everyone's help to make it happen. Please reply.

Thanks,

--
Tollef Fog Heen <tfheen@canonical.com>
dann frazier <daniel_frazier@hp.com>
Lamont Jones <lamont.jones@hp.com>
Scott James Remnant <scott@canonical.com>
Matt Taggart <matt.taggart@hp.com>
Matt Zimmerman <mdz@canonical.com>