Re: Debian AMD64 - any 32bit compatibility?
On Tuesday 29 August 2006 20:17, Thomas Steffen wrote:
> BTW: what happened to the many plans of running 32bit binaries without
> a chroot?
>
> In my experience, a chroot environment is a mayor PITA, and it is the
> one main reason that I would not recommend a 64bit system yet expect
> for the most enthusiastic early adopters.
Mixed 32 and 64 bit systems are a PITA however you implement them, be it
through a chroot {the Debian way} or having separate /lib and /lib64
directories {the R*d H*t way}. And there should be no need to have them
anyway.
The fact is simple: any piece of software which will not compile cleanly on a
pure 64-bit system IS BROKEN.
The vast majority of the "problems" with 64-bit-only systems exist only
because of closed-source software such as Flash player {a delivery vehicle
for annoying advertisements}, Adobe Acrobat Reader {a second-rate PDF
displayer, slower, uglier and more bloated than kPDF or gPDF, which -- thanks
mainly to misleading icons -- people mistakenly assume they need} and Skype
{a bait-and-switch scam where users are promised free telephone calls, which
one day will be used to deliver lucrative, unignorable advertisements}.
The exception to the rule-of-thumb is OpenOffice.org. Although it is Free
Software, it is riddled with elementary mistakes, starting from the
assumption that the processor uses a 32-bit word length and a 32-bit address
space, which have severely impacted upon its portability even to other 32-bit
architectures.
This fiasco should serve as a strident wake-up call to the Free Software
Community. Remember, OpenOffice.org began life as the closed-source Star
Office. The egregious programming errors displayed in its source code were
tolerated because nobody was checking up on them. How many other
closed-source products contain fundamental design mistakes that nobody knows
about because the source is kept secret from the users?
To deny access to the source code of a program shows nothing but contempt for
users, and we should not tolerate this blatant abuse.
--
AJS
delta echo bravo six four at earthshod dot co dot uk
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