Re: Bug#259302: base-files: Support for amd64. (fwd)
On Thu, Jul 15, 2004 at 12:22:06AM +0200, Santiago Vila wrote:
> Hello.
>
> I have received the following bug report. Would you please be so kind
> to provide some rationale for it? Specifically:
>
> What are these symlinks for?
According the the LSB, all amd64 libs should be installed in the
"lib64". Also ld.so is linked in every binary as
/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 while it's really installed as
/lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2.
We can solve the ld.so problem by placing it in his own /lib64
with nothing else in it. But in that case we would also have to
install all other libs in lib64 instead of lib to be LSB
compliant. This change would require a major effort on all
library packages. We also don't think that this solution
(biarch) is the right solution and that we would like to go for
the multiarch solution. For that, all libraries would have to be
changed (again). To not have to do all the work twice and have a
general solution to the problem we currently went with the
solution of using the symlinks.
> Exactly what software or package uses them?
> Are they really mandatory or optional?
> What happens if they do not exist?
Almost all package atleast need to find the ld.so. So the
symlink from /lib64 to lib is needed for all of them. The others
are there to be compatible with the LSB.
> Why do you think base-files should care about these symlinks and not,
> for example, libc6 or base-config?
There used to be and maybe still are packages that try to install
something in the /lib64 dir. They would create a directory
before we could create the symlink. We need(ed) something that
would create the symlinks before those were installed.
> Should these symlinks really be recreated every time the package containing
> them is upgraded, or should the user have the freedom to remove them?
Removing the /lib64 symlink might create problems during upgrade.
I don't know if it gets removed or not. I don't remember having
problems with the last time it was upgraded though.
Kurt
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