Re: Upcoming Debian multiarch support (amd64, sparc64, s390x, mips64) [affects sarge slightly]

[Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>]

Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> writes:

> On Tue, Jan 13, 2004 at 09:17:12AM +0100, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
> > Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> writes:
> > > On Sun, Jan 11, 2004 at 07:15:59PM +0100, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
> > > > > > Ideas, complains, objections?
> > > > > Yes; renaming the packages is a _good_ thing; breaking the "one installed
> > > > It means you have to adapt 10K packages instead of 1K. Renaming means
> > > > every Depends and Build-Depends line has to be looked at manually and
> > > > 99% have to be adapted. 
> > > Only up to a point. Most of this would be automatic from shlibdeps.
> > Build-Depends don't work by magic 
> 
> Build-Depends work fine: you don't change the name of the -dev package
> (which means you can install the i386 or amd64 -dev package but not both),
> and set the buildds to only install native packages.

And from all I heard over the last month on debian-amd64 the drift is
to support building i386 and amd64 programs at the same time. A
feature which would put us way ahead of other amd64 linux
distributions.

It also saves you the trouble of having your own build chroot to
compile something other than the default ABI or to purg and reinstall
all the -dev packages.

> > and any Depends manualy set in the
> > control file has to be changed. 
> 
> That's why you don't set library dependencies manually. If you do, you
> suffer miserably. Big deal -- that's not news, and that's why almost no
> one does it.

Too many packages do. Nearly allways just as an extra version depends
on top of shlibdeps.

> > > > > package, one name" rule is really bad. What does "dpkg -L libc6" do on
> > > > The thing is you still have one package, one name. You just have
> > > > multiple debs providing different ABIs of the same package. 
> > > The problem comes when you want to install them at the same time. If
> > > you're installing two packages with the same name, that's the problem.
> > But only in dpkg, dselect, apt and aptitude. Thats 4 packages to
> > change compared to nearly every package.
> 
> Yeah, four of the most complicated packages, that cause the most problems
> for *everyone* if they fail...

We have 2 years to straighten them out :)

> Cheers,
> aj

MfG
        Goswin