Re: An introduction to multiarch
On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 11:57:12PM +0200, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
> Hi,
>
> after listening to the "Multiarch round table" talk at Debconf I feel
> that the talk was targeted at people already familiar with the subject
> and jumped right in at full speed. Someone new to the idea was
> probably lost in the first minute.
>
> So I decided to write an introduction to the problem that focuses more
> on the user side, why we want multiarch at all, what goals and
> requirements are to be met and gives some pointers. I leave the
> techincal details to the actual proposal. Hopefully that helps more
> people to jump on the wagon and help. Note that this is to be taken
> together with the proposal itself:
>
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MultiarchSpec
>
For once, this summarises nicely what a lot of the arguments are about
in one post. Multiarch and "the right way to do it" have been bones of
contention for a long time - since at least the time of "pure64" for
amd64. Now can we get on and _do_ it, without another three or more
years of argument :)
For what it's worth, personally, I _like_ being able to have a system
where I know what's 32 bit and what's 64 bit and being able to
explicitly install what's needed or have an operating system which is
smart enough to work out appropriate installation - and Debian's good
at that.
The Red Hat approach of throwing it all in anyway such that 32 and 64 bit
.rpms can be installed at the same time with the same names and
trample over each other - and the third party software that "just assumes"
the 32 bit compatibility libraries will still be there or ships vast
quantities of private libraries to make sure - is an abomination.
AndyC
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