Bug#198158: architecture i386 isn't i386 anymore
* Stephen Stafford (ssta@pol.ac.uk) [030620 15:35]:
> Judging from my random contacts with users, it's a fairly usual setup to see
> a network of higher (500Mhz+) end hardware machines which sit on a LAN in
> 1918space and are masqueraded to the outside internet by a firewall/gateway
> running Debian on a 486 or low end pentium. I believe this to be a fairly
> significant proportion of our userbase and I'd oppose any move to
> marginalise them like this.
Well, the key problem is: debian doesn't properly support the way
i386+ is constructed. That does also make problems for amd64.
It would be really nice to be able to just put (additional) i686- (or
64bit-)optimized binaries in place where they are usefull, but only
there and without doubling every binary.
An possible way is: split i386 into subarchitectures i386-[subtype]
and a plain i386, where subtype is one of i486, i586, i686, .... For
every subtype there is a list what subtypes are acceptable in addition
to plain i386 to install (so a i386-i686 would also install i386-i486
and i386-i586 packages). At creating the debian packages, normally
(also with Architecture: any) only the plain i386 packages are
created. If it is usefull to generate also packages for one or more
subtypes they must be specified explizitly at the Architecture line.
This way would also have the advantage that the existing mmx, 3dnow,
... packages (that are really just making the package list larger
without adding content) can be removed.
Cheers,
Andi
--
http://home.arcor.de/andreas-barth/
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