Re: AMD64 for sarge [Re: <rant> Package: ftpmasters, Severity: serious, ...]

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

Daniel Jacobowitz <dan@debian.org> writes:

> On Wed, Jul 07, 2004 at 04:51:08PM +0200, Josselin Mouette wrote:
>
> You have your history quite confused; do you think that the Debian ia64
> port is "old" in this regard?
>
> Debian's SPARC port used lib64 in 1999.  Irix was using it by 1994.
> Solaris was using /usr/lib/64 by 1998.  All of these were probably
> earlier also; I didn't do much research.
>
> This convention has been around for a very long time.

You mean conventions? lib64 and lib/64 are certainly to different
things.

>> On a more practical note, lib64 being a symlink doesn't affect all
>> programs that don't set a RPATH. Thus we can support quite a large
>> subset of existing ia32 software, without claiming LSB compliance for
>> ia32, which you can easily achieve anyway by installing a i386
>> distribution (or a chroot).
>
> I was objecting to multiarch, not to the lib64 symlink.

The probelm with lib/lib32/lib64 is that it only works for part of the
multiarch architectures and not at all for multikernel support. It is
also a different solution depending on the arch making it neccessary
to build different flavours of packages for the same arch intented for
different multiarch/kernel systems.

Lets take i386 binaries:

1. flavour: normal i386 debs with lib as we have now
2. flavour: 32 bit ia64 debs with lib32
3. flavour: 32 bit i386 debs with /emul/i386-linux for kfreebsd or qemu

Since trippling the archive space for i386 is out of the question
support would have to be dropped.

The current lib/lib32/lib64 also means the packages have to hardcode
specific paths for specific archs.

The multiarch proposel simplifies that to one path (constructed from
the gnu triplet) across all systems. It simplifies support, unifies
all archs and kernel into one simple scheme and allows to support all
combinations of archs and kernels.

MfG
        Goswin

PS: Even with multiarch it is still possible to be compatible to
current systems through a few links created and maintained by a
ldconfig wraper. That is currently being worked on so a smooth
transition to multiarch is possible.