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

["Julian Mehnle" <lists@mehnle.net>]

Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Le dim 11/01/2004 à 08:00, Goswin von Brederlow a écrit :
> > The currently implemented idea was to rename the amd64 package of
> > libfoobar to lib64foobar and have amd64 binary packages depend on that
> > name instead. libfoobar.so goes to /lib and lib64foobar.so to
> > /lib64. That works so far.
>
> Am I the only one to think the whole /lib64 idea is fundamentally
> broken? We already have ia64 without this. We can build a very similar
> system for amd64, introducing a new arch. Then, ship a few 32-bit
> compatibility libraries for 32-bit proprietary software.

Yes, I also think the /lib64 idea is fundamentally broken.

The reason why we did not want to create a completely separate arch for
amd64 was that every self-contained arch consumes huge quantities of space
since almost all arch-dependant binary packages have to be duplicated for
the arch.  But in the case of amd64 (and some other archs), many packages
can be reused from legacy archs without significant performance penalties,
so only few packages (where it makes sense performance-wise) would need to
be recompiled for amd64.

In this spirit, I made a proposal[1] for supporting so called
"architecture versions" and "architecture features" in 2003-06.  It didn't
specifically cover any /lib(64)? issues, though, but only package
management issues.

[1]
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/debian-devel-200306/msg01714.htm
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