Intel have decided _not_ to use the same name for the instruction set as AMD and indeed to be different in details of the implementation. Therefore the asserted reasons to make the name consistent across the vendors is totally irrelevant because THERE IS NO CONSISTENT NAME. In the past, Debian has chosen the name to incorporate the processor marketing name and/or the manufacturer and thus has resulted in "sparc" "i386" and similar names. For complete consistency, which was the asserted reason for the name change, we should use "opteron" as the architecture on that basis.
I actually prefer "amd64" because that indicates who originally created the architecture. If we are going to change at all, it should be _immediate_ and should be to what GNU uses ... which is "x86_64". However, I think this is the wrong thing to do because we don't use underscores in the other architectures.
I think the idea of putting a hyphen in is stupid, irrespective of what characters are on either side of the hyphen, because there is other ongoing work that has a defacto policy that the presence of a hyphen indicates a non-linux kernel indicated by the prefix word. What are we going to do when netbsd does a 64bit port and we want to have debian supported on that? Perhaps we will call it "netbsd-x86-64" and encourage all the package maintainers to rewrite their parsing scripts that are trying to make sense of this mess for multiarch purposes.
On Thu, Jun 03, 2004 at 05:36:41PM +0200, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
Currently only the following are actively working on the pure64 port (from the keyring that governs who may upload):
I didn't realize that you had to be a developer and put a key on the upload ring in order to be asked whether a decision was the correct one to take. John, would you please be my advocate and mentor ? It sounds like I _have_ to go through NM processing in order to get the opportunity to say "Listen to John!".
Alex. John Goerzen wrote:
On Thu, Jun 03, 2004 at 11:23:13AM -0400, Stephen Frost wrote:Personally, my preference is to go with whatever produces: dpkg --print-architecture = amd64 dpkg --print-gnu-architecture = x86-64 (or x86_64, whichever is right)I agree. Let's look at some of the arguments that have been raised recently: * amd64 ties it to AMD, but we expect Intel to release a compatible processor as well. This does not seem to have bothered us when dealing with i386, which is Intel's chosen name, as opposed to K7 or others that have developed extensions to Intel's specs. If AMD designed the spec, I see no reason to avoid giving them credit just as we have done with Intel or others. Besides, this is the chosen name for the platform. The fact that AMD released i386-compatible CPUs didn't lead anyone to suggest renaming i386 to x86 or ia32. In fact, the existance of AMD's compatible CPUs predated the existance of Debian itself. * x86-64 corresponds better with GNU tools and the kernel. No, it doesn't. They use the underscore. The ensuing confusion promises to be worse. Besides, GNU tools often say i486 for our i386 distro. * We could use the underscore later. That means switching our name twice more. A huge pain. Plus, we don't even know if that is the case. * Others use x86-64. No, they use x86_64. Actually, plenty of others use amd64, including Gentoo, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Mandrake, and some other smaller distros. * Renaming is easy. As Goswin has pointed out, it's not all that easy and in fact is quite time-consuming. I am all for amd64.