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

[Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net>]

* Goswin von Brederlow (brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de) wrote:
> Do you realy thing ls will run any faster in 64 bit? Well, ok, ls is
> 64 bit already.
> 
> But most applications aren't cpu bound at all. Most users wouldn't
> mind or might even want a 64bit only system but need they don't.

Need?  Who defines what people need?  No one *needs* an amd64 port, just
use i386 on amd64, works just fine, right?  It can even use the loads of
memory you put into the system, so long as it's not one application that
needs it all.  I can tell you that *this* user needs a 64bit system,
including a 64bit ls which will actually probably make it more
*efficient* thanks to faster handling of 64bit data types and the
additional registers.  Debian *needs* to support an amd64 system which
is purely 64bit, through multiarch or a native system.  If we're not
going to do that then we might as well forget supporting the
architecture at all.

I'm not interested in a half-ass amd64 system.

> Getting everything 64bit will be a big problem with non-free.

One of the main *reasons* for multiarch is so that we can still support
non-free crap and commercial crap while the rest of the system is 64bit.
Obviously there are situations where it's useful to provide 32bit
libraries to support these applications, that doesn't mean we should
avoid allowing our users to have pure 64bit systems if they don't have
non-free or commercial things which require 32bit libraries.

> >From what I hear IA64 has no i386 compatibility, just some emulation
> (which of cause is slow). I didn't include IA64 (or ppc64) because
> noone from that port has shown intrest in the multiarch stuff till
> now.

In this sense we need to be consistent across architectures so
regardless of their interest it will affect them and therefore those
archs should be included in the discussion.

	Stephen

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