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

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

Chris Cheney <ccheney@cheney.cx> writes:

> On Sun, Jan 11, 2004 at 10:23:27PM +0100, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
> > Ok, the lesser abi is i386. Please do change sarge. :)
> > 
> > As said before there are 3 groups:
> > 
> > 1. pure i386 system
> > 2. pure amd64 system
> > 3. multiarch system
> > 
> > SuSe and RH only support 1 and 2. Debian wanted to support all 3 and
> > hat conflicts with one ABIs packages depending on the other. Forcing
> > the i386 packages on pure amd64 users bloats the system needlessly.
> > You might not like it but so far the middle ground for all has been
> > to support all 3 setups even if that means eventually splitting a
> > bunch of packages to prevent the bloat.
> 
> Since both RedHat and SuSE don't support multiarch systems there is little
> reason for Debian to either. Lets face it, the only reason Debian is even
> considering multiarch is for COMMERCIAL NON-FREE BINARY-ONLY crap to work,
> any company producing said software for Linux will want it to work on at
> least RedHat and SuSE...
> 
> Chris

Bad choise of words. SuSe and RH actively support only 1 and 2 but
allow for 3. You can easily install i386 software yourself on amd64
but the packaging system and developement files don't help you with
that.

Anything thats statically compiled or just links against libc6 is
pretty much a no brainer to install.


And yes, the only real long term reason for 32bit amd64 support is
"COMMERCIAL NON-FREE BINARY-ONLY crap". The reason for /lib64 and
/usr/lib64 on the other hand is compatibility with other linux
distributions.

And its a completly different world for sparc64, mips64, s390x,
ppc64. Arguing about amd64 not needing 32bit doesn't help at
all. There are still 4 archs left that do need it. Multiarch support
is comming one way or the other, live with it. The question is how not
if.

MfG
        Goswin