Re: Concerns about AMD64 port
On Thu, Feb 05, 2004 at 11:16:29AM -0500, Stephen Frost wrote:
> > The problem, as said above, is getting each file in the right
> > place. Otherwise upgrading to a mixed system will be hell or
> > impossible.
>
> It's only a problem of putting it in the 'right' place if you want the
> 'right' place to be /lib64 or /usr/lib64 instead of just building a
> pure-64bit port.
Oh, and there's an even simpler fix to get us going right now: symlinks.
cd /
ln -s lib lib64
cd /usr
ln -s lib lib64
Poof, done.
As for the upgrade path, when it comes time to actually build packages
with the libs in /lib64 and /usr/lib64, the autobuilder should get most
of those as the packages are updated. The few remaining packages can be
binary-only NMU'd. They don't even have to be upgraded all at once to
avoid breaking pure 64-bit systems thanks to the wonders of ld.so.conf.
> It's not wasted because it'd be done quickly and used by all of the
> people who are bitching that we don't have an amd64 port *today*. I
> expect we're going to continue to see these mails and complaints over
> the next year before multiarch support works and likely for every 1 mail
> we see there's 20-50 other people who just read the webpage and said
> "well, forget that."
I can say that were I not a Debian developer, I would have taken just
that attitude and installed a system with real support for AMD64, such
as NetBSD. I may yet do that anyway. All this hand-waving about
multiarch crap is pointless. The only issue trotted out is the lib
naming one, and I've already demonstrated two ways that this is trivial
to deal with -- and I've only been on this list for two hours.
Not to mention that multiarch is not even needed by most people, that
nobody even knows how we're going to do it.
Plus, Goswin, in the long-run *multiarch* is the path of wasted time.
If we are not going to want to waste our time, let us do a pure 64-bit
userland, since eventually people will go there anyway, and multiarch
will be deprecated on this platform.
I know of one package in Debian right now that will not work on a 64-bit
platform, and I know of no packages that we can expect to behave like
that in the future.
-- John
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