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Re: -= PROPOSAL =- Release sarge with amd64



* Raul Miller

| > Everyone knows that.  If it was, we'd be doing it and sarge would be >
| released in 2006 at best.  That does NOT provide justification to not >
| support AMD64 at *all*.
| 
| The question is, what's the upgrade path to an amd64 system which supports
| 32 bit code?  Is that going to be easier from i386 than from amd64?

It will be the same (both path-wise and difficulty-wise).

| First, you'd have to build a system which references /lib64 instead
| of /lib, once you've upgraded to that system you could then get rid of
| /lib and replace it with a 32 bit /lib/.  Which means we'd be ready take
| advantage of amd64 native support for i386 binaries sometime around 2010.
| Maybe.

Please, go read http://raw.no/debian/amd64-multiarch-3 and
http://www.linuxbase.org/~taggart/multiarch.html .  Multiarch does not
require a full migration, it can be done piecewise (though, libc needs
to be done first, for obvious reasons).

| That's not a very exciting prospect to consider if the reason we're
| trying to get amd64 in sarge is that not offering the support for the
| architecture that other distributions do would make us a "laughingstock".

I haven't seen anybody laugh at gentoo for not providing 32 bit AMD64
support.

| I can guarantee you'd get more support for a 64/32 bit system than a
| pure 64 bit system.  [As in, I'd contribute.]

I wouldn't.  Not until you do it the right way, which is to do it
multiarch.

| > Right, so you'd be able to run AMD64 Debian and i386 Debian.  What
| > you're proposing is that we only offer i386 Debian.  How is that better?
| 
| Less complex upgrade path to AMD64 with 32 bit support.

All libraries are going to move _no matter what_ for multiarch, they'll
move to /{,usr}/lib/$arch-$os, so it won't matter.

| And that's aside from problems like "ok, I've got my 64/32 
| environment running X, and now I want to run a debian X app
| inside a chroot cage."

Then bind-mount /tmp and it will just work.

| Last time I checked [two days ago], the trivial change to dpkg to support
| amd64 hadn't happened.   I think making sure that the debian package tools
| work right for the architecture should be considered pre-requisites for
| using the package system to present the rest of the packages.

http://cvs.debian.org/dpkg/archtable.diff?r1=1.21.2.11&r2=1.21.2.12&only_with_tag=v1_10&cvsroot=dpkg

Seems to have been applied about three weeks ago.

-- 
Tollef Fog Heen                                                        ,''`.
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are      : :' :
                                                                      `. `' 
                                                                        `-  



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