Re: multiarch?
On 08/07/05, Nikita V. Youshchenko <yoush@cs.msu.su> wrote:
>
>
> > On Thu, Jul 07, 2005 at 10:03:09PM +0200, Pierre Habouzit wrote:
> >> Le Jeu 7 Juillet 2005 21:17, Josselin Mouette a ?crit :
> >> > If we don't start the multiarch effort now, it won't be good for
> >> > etch. Are we postponing this to the next release?
> >>
> >> I hope not ... I'm a quite happy owner of amd64 machines, so happy that
> >> I've only amd64 machines for my desktops, and maintaining a chroot to
> >> use openoffice is quite annoying (same is true for quake/et but I
> >> assume it won't bother debian that much ;p)
> >
> > Wouldn't you be better off with a native Oo.org rather than multiarch
> > in this case?
>
> World is not pure 64.
> There exists software - and will exist in forseable future - which (a) is
> needed for users, and (b) is not available 64bit.
>
> Although some hacks are possible to make it run - such as 32bit chroot or
> putting stuff in /emul - hacks have never been the Debian way. Debian was
> known for years for it's technical quality, and it's a suicide solution to
> make this no longer true.
>
> Multiarch, although being some technical challenge, is an elegant solution
> for this situation. And it is useful for all archs which have hardware
> capability to run both 64 bit and 32 bit binaries (and also for those who
> wish to run non-native binaries with emulation techniques such as qemu)
>
>
> What real reasons (other than "it's cool") are there to run 64bit software?
>
> - in some cases, it gives real (greater than 1%) performance gain.
> - in some cases, address space wider than 32bit is useful.
I have also noticed that some applications when built, are smaller.
>
Also, why not lobby some of these non pure software makers to also
create pure-amd64/pure-*64 builds of their software.
However, in the end, I see no problem with pure 64bit distributions,
the one i'm on currently works better than great. Personally, I'd
sooner see a chroot-32 package that will let install a working 32bit
chroot, and then let me apt-get install openoffice... to that
location. That way, we are still talking about been user friendly and
we are affecting only the applications that won't run on pure 64bit
distributions.
My 2 cents,
--
N Jones
Blogging @ http://nigelj.blogspot.com
Proud Debian & FOSS User
Debian Maintainer of: html2ps & ipkungfu
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