AMD64 and lib64
I talked to Chris Yeoh of the Linux Standards Base (LSB) recently and
mentioned that the current port uses /lib rather than /lib64 (the
latter is required by the LSB). He strongly advised against using
/lib plus /lib64 symlinks, and he kindly elaborated the problem below.
How do you address these concerns and how much work would it be to use
/lib64 (libtool could be patched to use that path by default, but how
many libraries don't use it?).
----- Forwarded message from Christopher Yeoh <cyeoh@samba.org> -----
From: Christopher Yeoh <cyeoh@samba.org>
Subject: Re: AMD and lib64
Date: Wed, 7 Jul 2004 11:59:35 +1000
To: Martin Michlmayr <tbm@cyrius.com>
X-Mailer: VM 7.18 under Emacs 21.3.1
At 2004/7/6 20:07+0100 Martin Michlmayr writes:
> * tbm <tbm@cyrius.com> [2004-06-29 12:24]:
> > Can you briefly outline why you think going with /lib for our AMD64
> > port and using symlinks for /lib64 would be a bad idea? I briefly
> > talkd to some AMD64 porters and they'd prefer to remain with /lib plus
> > /lib64 symlinks.
>
> Do you think you could do that?
Sorry, lost track of the earlier email.
For LSB compliance /lib64 has to exist and third party packages will
expect to install into that directory.
I think my concern would be how are you going to support 32 bit
compatability? Where do the the ordinary 32 bit libraries live if /lib
contains the 64 bit ones?
External 32 bit packages will expect to be able to install and use
libraries in /lib and /usr/lib. I would imagine that there would be
quite a few cases where people want to run the 32 bit versions because
64 bit ones have not yet been produced.
They will definitely need to be separate directories if you want the
AMD64 port to be IA32 LSB certified as well as AMD64 certified.
For binary compatability reasons with other distributions you should
be also careful that all of the application binaries refer to /lib64
rather than /lib.
Chris
--
cyeoh@au.ibm.com
IBM OzLabs Linux Development Group
Canberra, Australia
----- End forwarded message -----
--
Martin Michlmayr
leader@debian.org
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