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

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

Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> writes:

> * Goswin von Brederlow (brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de) wrote:
> > Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> writes:
> > > > >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.
> > 
> > Should we include m68k, arm, alpha too?  Well, for alpha you can make
> > the case with True64 32 bit binaries (like Netscape was). But the
> > other archs should not be affected at all by any change. Not even
> > i386, sparc, mips, s390 should be affected, since then we would loose
> > compatibility to existing packages.
> 
> I said 'those' archs, not all archs.  We don't need to include archs
> which don't have 64/32bit dual support unless we start getting into the
> discussion (again) of supporting optimizations as subarchs (ie: 486,
> 586, 686, etc).
> 
> 	Stephen

We already are with the multiarch stuff. The existing patches to dpkg
define a chain of compatible architectures, their abis, compile flags,
lib_dir, aliases.

You can install Architecture: i686 under amd64 just fine or i585 on
i686.

Of cause any binary-i686/Packages file in debian should be sparsely
populated by just a few packages that realy benefit from it.

MfG
        Goswin