Re: A Radical Multi-Arch Counter-Proposal

[Xavier Roche <rocheml@httrack.com>]

Hi,

On Thu, Jan 15, 2004 at 11:36:45PM -0500, Anthony DeRobertis wrote:
>      A. dpkg will be extended to support installing two packages with
>         the same name, but different ABIs, as previously proposed.
>      B. dpkg will be extended to support two packages with the same name
>         (as above) both owning the same file. It will only remove a file
>         from the filesystem when the last owning package is removed.

This is not to throw another (slightly off-topic on devel-x86-64) though, but I was (stupidely) wondering if the 32/64 packaging questions and migration could not also be extended to a possibly "586 optimized" packages asked by many folks (supposely 5% to 30% performances increase) ; see related information at http://debian-i586.sourceforge.net/

I know this has been discussed before (the 586 optimized packages), and I don't want to fire another-yet-potential flame, but considering an "x86-x586" arch is potentially similar to "x86-64" (different /lib place, potentially same package names, possibility to install different flavours ..)

If the dpkg system has to be improved for x86-64, it might be a good idea to allow such thing ?

Just a slightly off-topic idea.
[Sorry for the potentially bad english]