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 Tue, Jan 13, 2004 at 09:47:15AM +0100, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> The naming seems somewhat braindead IMHO if this trend is going to
> continue it would make much more sense to deprecate lib itself and force
> use of lib32/lib64 dirs. On ia64 /usr/lib is 64bit (right?) and on amd64
> and others it is 32bit. On ia64 it is 64bit because the native mode is
> 64bit (right?), amd64 should be native 64bit also but uses /usr/lib64 (and
> should support installing 32bit libs). This inconsistency it very
> annoying. If everything used the full lib32/lib64 dir naming it would
> break everything once but would be much more consistent afterwards.
> 
> Chris

The reason for /lib 32 bit and /lib64 64 bit is to keep compatibility
to i386 compiled programs. I don't know how IA64 handles its /lib32
subdir but they probably have some magic in there that fails if
binaries are compiled with some uncommon options (like setting rpath).

On amd64 the only real reason for 32 bit support is compatibility with
the old i386 stuff and binary-only stuff so breaking it even once is
not realy acceptable to a lot of people.

MfG
        Goswin