multiarch status update
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>
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