Re: multiarchitecture binaries - technical obstacles?
Couldn't this be done more easily just by having the debian packages be
multi-arch bundles where an executable for each platform is included?
Why is it necessary to pack them all into the same elf file and then
strip that later?
It's not really a good idea to modify the files produced by a binary
package after install anyway, since that thwarts security/administation
measures like hashing a file against the version in the source package
to verify that it's correct.
Doing this might reduce the archive size, but it would increase
bandwidth use on the mirrors, since either way the packages would be
bigger.
-J
On Mon, Apr 14, 2003 at 01:18:20PM -0600, Barak Pearlmutter wrote:
> Years ago, NeXT modified GCC and the rest of the GNU tools to allow
> them to produce multi-architecture binaries, so that a single binary
> executable could run on both 68k and i386 platforms. They also had a
> tool that could strip out hunks for unwanted architectures.
>
> Maybe that code has decayed, and maybe it had problems ... but it sure
> would be nice if it could be resurrected and used by us, so that
> Debian became able to produce multiplatform .deb containing such
> multi-architecture executables. Here are a few potential benefits: it
> would reduce the total volume of the archive; eliminate separate
> i386/Pentium/686/MMX-optimized packages; reduce the burden on the
> autobuilders; reduce cross-architecture version-skew; catch
> cross-architecture compilation problems earlier; ensure widespread
> availability of binary packages for multiple architectures; make the
> upcoming deployment of competing 64-bit CPUs from Intel and AMD less
> painful for our users; and be a unique feather in Debian's cap.
>
> I'm hoping that people familiar with the tool chain could share
> something about the status of those old multi-architecture features,
> and how much of a hassle (or of an impossibility) it might be to get
> them working.
>
>
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