Re: Port Name: A Vote
marc.miller@amd.com writes:
> True, but Debian is striving to be LSB-compliant. Gentoo doesn't
> care about LSB compliance. I'm not sure about Mandrake's intentions
> with regard to the LSB; I believe they were taking Debian's lead, as
> "amd64" had been decided on early on, and on the day MandrakeSoft
> needed to know, our marketing department had some unrealistic
> expectations about retroactive changes that would spread throughout
> the community. We realize this confusing messaging from AMD about
> branding has caused some grief for a number of individuals and
> companies. Together with Linus Torvalds's input, AMD has agreed
> that the engineering string used to describe ports of Linux should
> remain x86_64, with the provision that amd64 should be aliased to
> x86_64.
>
> Meanwhile, the BSD universe fell slightly behind Linux in its
> porting efforts and the port name became critical late enough that
> it was able to adopt the new "AMD64" string as the port name, in
> compliance with the new architecture name specified by AMD early
> last year.
>
> Our concern is that by choosing AMD64 as the port name, it could
> forfeit its compliance with the x86-64 LSB. We don't want to see
> that happen any more than you do. By conforming to the various
> publicly-available standardized Linux specifications, Debian ensures
> proper compatibility. That's what AMD and most of AMD's customers
> want most of all.
The thing is that debian has two different arch strings, the debian
architecture and the GNU architecture:
% dpkg-architecture
DEB_BUILD_ARCH=amd64
DEB_BUILD_GNU_CPU=x86_64
DEB_BUILD_GNU_SYSTEM=linux
DEB_BUILD_GNU_TYPE=x86_64-linux
DEB_HOST_ARCH=amd64
DEB_HOST_GNU_CPU=x86_64
DEB_HOST_GNU_SYSTEM=linux
DEB_HOST_GNU_TYPE=x86_64-linux
This is what we currently use with great success. It means that
packages are called package_version_amd64.deb. The Debian specific
debian/rules and debian/control file use amd64 as Debian architecture
while the sources and autotools use the GNU name x86_64.
Does that fullfill the LSB?
MfG
Goswin
PS: DEB_BUILD_ARCH is the port name, what marketing will have to use,
whats stamped on Debian CDs and boxed. That seems to be amd64 for
everyone else.
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