Re: Concerns about AMD64 port
Cameron Patrick <cameron@patrick.wattle.id.au> writes:
> Eric Sharkey wrote:
>
> | > It's my strong belief that Goswin and the others that are working on
> | > Debian AMD64 are very correct to be working a biarch port.
> |
> | I also agree that Goswin is taking the right approach.
> |
> | It's best not to waste man power on a 64-bit only system, when that
> | work could be put to making a better multi-arch solution. This is
> | also very important for PPC/PPC64, which is in a similar position.
>
> Yes, but why wouldn't a 64-bit only AMD64 system be useful after the
Because the base that multiarch will try to be compatible with is
32bit i386 and not 64bit amd64. It starts with the dpkg upgrade
guessing that all previously installed packages would be i386
binaries and marking them as such in the status file. On a 64bit amd64
that would be catastrophic.
> multi-arch infrastructure is ready in just the same way that the current
> 32-bit PPC port will be useful on PPC64 machines? i.e. in the case of
> mips, sparc, s390, ppc, etc the port to the "main" architecture exists
> before multi-arch support, so you might as well have amd64 in that list
> too. (amd64 will just be different in that the 32-bit will be the
> slower and less-used architecture rather than the 64-bit as in with the
> other cases.)
>
> Cameron.
MfG
Goswin
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