Re: amd64 and dpkg and so
On Wednesday 27 August 2003 08:31 pm, marc.miller@amd.com wrote:
> To clarify, I (being me, and not necessarily AMD) still love the 32/64
> hybrid idea, and if "doogie" is the gatekeeper here, I'm willing to
> approach him myself to see if there's something AMD can do to make him
> more flexible on this issue. Given the pent-up demand for an AMD64 port
> of Debian, I (speaking as AMD for a moment) would rather see a pure
> 64-bit port than none at all.
I'd go one step further and say that the 32/64 hybrid Opteron system may be
required. At work I occaisionally deal with rather picky closed-source
software. Library dependencies may require that I install 32-bit versions
of some libs, as well as their 64-bit version.
I don't see a pure 64-bit port as that useful; there's a lot of software
that I just don't need rebuilt (apache, for example). Will /bin/ls run
faster if it's built 64-bit native? Does anyone care? In my opinion, a
pure 64-bit port isn't a good use of time and space (though it is a swift
way to check the "we support Opteron box", if such marketroid things matter
in Debian technical circles).
Why not extend what's currently done for sparc64? Yes, admittedly it's a
bit of a hack. However, it means I can install both the 32-bit and the
64-bit version of a library side by side. Granted, building the
libfoo-amd64 package may be a bit of extra work; it's possible files would
conflict with the 32-bit version. However, the 64-bit porting could be
done on a package-by-package basis, as needed.
These extra -amd64 packages could be kept in a separate apt archive
initially, until proper testing can be done and a place found in the main
archives. All that would really be required initially would be an
Opteron-aware installer, kernel, glibc, binutils, and compilers. Sure,
this wouldn't be ready for sarge, but it'd be a quick add-on that could
work fairly well. Heck, I might even be able to convince my boss to let me
put a few machines and interns on such a project.
Opinions? Flames? Imported cheeses?
--
Mike Shuey
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