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Re: -= PROPOSAL =- Release sarge with amd64



* Raul Miller

| It's fairly simple for the port to be built to support both 32 and 64
| bit LSB apps, and still allow for migration to multiarch.

As others have said -- it's not easy to support both 32 and 64 bit.  If
you want to do that properly, you should implement multiarch.

Please keep migration to multiarch out of the equation -- as long as you
stay out of /lib/$arch-$os (i[34]86-linux, x86_64-linux), you are fine.

| [For example: Have /lib64 be a symlink link to /x86_64-linux/lib and have
| /lib be a symlink to /i486-linux/lib (similar for /usr/lib*).  Make sure
| that the libraries explicitly mentioned in LSB are installed in the 64
| bit library, leave the others as known bugs, to be fixed when people have
| the time and inclination.  Make sure your patches respect some env var
| (perhaps MULTIARCH_HOST), and have that be set at a fairly high level.]

If you're going to do this, then why not do the full multiarch dance?
If you do that, you'll end up with fixing packages once, not twice.

| > > But this is reminding me of some of the pain from the /usr/doc ->
| > > /usr/share/doc/ transition.  [Where most everyone thought it was easy
| > > right up until it became a big hairy mess.]  I'd rather not go through
| > > something like that again.  [And why did we go through that at all?
| > > For LSB compliance.]
| > 
| > Uh, multiarch *will* be painful.  biarch *would* have been painful too.
| > We're not disputing that, that's why we're *NOT* asking for biarch or
| > multiarch to be part of sarge.  Not even close.  We're interested in
| > having pure64 released with sarge so that Debian users can use their
| > amd64 systems reasonably.
| 
| In my opinion, the only thing painful about my above example
| implementation is that it make the things that need to be fixed painfully
| obvious.

Have you made a biarch package yet?  If not, please do that and come
back when you have.  It's painful, to do it the right way.

| My current objections are that you're not planning for compliance with
| LSB and you're not planning for migration to multiarch.  Both will be
| a lot easier to achieve with just a little forethought.
| 
| [Before you explained about multiarch, my only objection was the lack
| of 32 bit LSB support.]

.. and the multiarch migration is independent of this and will happen
for all arches, not just multiarch-capable ones.  (Because even though
$random_arch might not be able to run some binaries doesn't mean that
$some_other_random_arch can't run $random_arch's binaries.)

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



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