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

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

Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> writes:

> On Sat, Jan 17, 2004 at 08:00:57AM +1100, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> > Lots of people have posted to say they want a full amd64 distribution
> > with everything recompiled, and I agree. So then apart from support for
> > source-less i386 binaries, why do we need the ability to install i386
> > packages?
> 
> Well, at least running on ppc, I find a few things are unavailable that
> are available for i386. Mostly non-free stuff, but also a few things
> that just don't port well.
> 
> Personally, I think being able to install foo_i386.deb on arch: non-i386
> would just be damn cool.
> 
> Cheers,
> aj

That isn't realy covered by the multiarch concept so far. I think it
never will be. For i386 on ppc you need an emulator, like qemu and you
can do install time tricks (like installing in /qemu/ instead of /)
and have qemu patch things up.

Getting i386 and ppc debs to be installable directly at the same time
is probably to much to ask, that would mean every deb, policy,
toolchain, FHS and pretty much everything else has to be
adapted. Thats nothing that can just be done till sarge+1.

Would be cool though.

MfG
        Goswin