RE: Port Name: A Vote
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.
-----Original Message-----
From: John Goerzen [mailto:jgoerzen@complete.org]
Sent: Tuesday, June 08, 2004 2:25 PM
To: Miller, Marc
Cc: debian-amd64@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: Port Name: A Vote
On Tue, Jun 08, 2004 at 02:08:48PM -0700, marc.miller@amd.com wrote:
> I'd just like to point out to the greater community that the rest of
> the Linux universe uses x86_64 as the generic string to describe this
> architecture (it's not tied to a particular brand name, and it avoids
> the problems of parsing package names using hyphens), and if Debian
I'm not so sure that's correct. Gentoo and Mandrake, for instance, use
amd64, as do various BSDs.
-- John
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