RE: Port Name: A Vote

[marc.miller@amd.com]

It fulfills the purpose of the LSB, that being that LSB-compliant packages developed by third parties can install and run on an LSB-compliant operating system.  

As was pointed out later in this thread, it seems the LSB doesn't necessarily describe this accurately.  As AMD worked with another company to have that LSB document written per AMD's desires at the time, it sounds like I need to do some checking around on the correct exact wording of the document.  But so long as no matter what the Debian community decides to do it doesn't violate the spirit of the LSB (described in my first paragraph above), AMD doesn't care so much how the port is described in "marketing material" (which I cautiously define as anything other than source code, which includes Debian documentation, Debian web site, and Debian-specific file names).

-----Original Message-----
From: Goswin von Brederlow [mailto:brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de]
Sent: Tuesday, June 08, 2004 3:52 PM
To: Miller, Marc
Cc: jgoerzen@complete.org; debian-amd64@lists.debian.org;
gbeauchesne@mandrakesoft.com
Subject: 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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