Re: Bug#240896: not pending anymore
Previously Stephen Frost wrote:
> Oh, really? That's why the kernel says i686 and gcc says i486?
Admittedly i?86 is crap in that respect but they're basically variants
of the same thing.
> Right, bringing in politics is useless and counter-productive, so why
> are you? Choosing amd64 isn't political, it's the argument about what
> to call it and why is political. I agree that we should just pick a
> name that will not confuse people- that's not x86-64/x86_64 which *will*
> be confusing to people as to which it is or will cause problems with our
> various tools.
Lets look at other big distributions:
Redhat: x86-64 (or 'Intel EM64T & AMD64' in their whitepapers)
SuSE: x86_64 (or 'AMD/Intel 64-bit processors')
Gentoo: amd64
Mandrake: AMD64
So the two biggest ones picked x86-64 (ignoring the - vs _). Slackware
and Conectiva do not support the architecture at the moment. Which means
that the vast majority of Linux users will know and recognize x64-64.
Now lets look at what developers will encounter:
kernel x86_64
gcc x86_64
binutils x86_64
So all developers chose x86_64.
Looking at that data it seems obvious that the Linux/free software community
has made its choice and overwhelmingly selected x86[_-]64. So why does
Debian want to different and pick a name that no developer uses and
users will not recognize from popular other distributions?
Wichert.
--
Wichert Akkerman <wichert@wiggy.net> It is simple to make things.
http://www.wiggy.net/ It is hard to make things simple.
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