Re: Edge and multi-arch
* Martin Michlmayr
| Basically, there has been a lot of discussions about multi-arch and
| some people seem to think that after sarge we'll _obviously_ move to
| multi-arch. Well, this is not so obvious to me. In particular, I see
| no consensus among ftpmaster/archive people, release people, toolchain
| people, porters, and basically everyone else that this is the way to
| go. If we decide to go with multi-arch, we need:
|
| - agreement of all these people
| - a _clear_ plan about this migration (and have this plan before
| sarge is out), including a clear timeplan (announcement on day X,
| maintainers have Y months to upload, if they don't do it in Y
| months, we'll have a time of Z people who'll NMU the packages by
| G).
We don't need to transition the full archive to multiarch at all, but
we need support in a bunch of core packages: glibc (for ld-linux.so)
(or whatever your libc is called if you're on a !glibc platform), gcc
and binutils. If not, you need to modify /etc/ld.so.conf and add
-L/usr/lib/$(gcc -dumpmachine) to all your compile lines, neither
which is nice.
To say it again: a full-scale migration is _not_ needed. I'm fine
with us just having the support in dpkg, glibc, gcc and binutils for
etch. I would like to have more than that ready and a bunch of fairly
core libraries ready to rock, but it's not needed.
Not transitioning all libraries is really no worse than having a split
of libraries between /usr/lib and /lib; it's just yet another place to
store libraries.
| - a proof of concept (this may exist already)
I'm working on that. If you are on i386 and would like to play around
a bit with it,
deb http://multiarch.err.no/ multiarch/all/
deb http://multiarch.err.no/ multiarch/$(ARCH)/
are the deb lines you might want.
Note that this is _EXPERIMENTAL_ work. That means stuff breaks, there
is no security support and I would strongly advise against running
this outside a chroot until it has matured.
This has a split libc6 package and if you have a multiarch-capable
dpkg, you can install both the i386 and amd64 libc6s.
| - agreement with some upstream LSB people that it's a good idea for
| Debian to pioneer this in the hope that others will follow suite
| (rather than a way of Debian to make itself incompatible with
| the rest of the world). [Chris Yeoh and taggart are the people
| to talk to.]
TTBOMK, «the others» are watching, but as this is a fairly big change,
they want to see of it goes before going the same way as us.
--
Tollef Fog Heen ,''`.
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are : :' :
`. `'
`-
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