Re: Introduction to multiarch: What maintainers must do

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Le Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 03:57:31PM +0200, Goswin von Brederlow a écrit :
> 
> I got some good feedback from my previous Introduction to multiarch
> post and some good questions. I'm singling out Manoj Srivastava here
> because he was the most recent to ask this on irc but there where
> others with the same or simmilar question.
> 
> The full multiarch proposal can be read on:
>   https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MultiarchSpec

Dear Goswin,

thank you very much for your vulgarisation efforts. Multi-architecture settings
will be very useful for scientific computing, where we only want the
applications that really need 64 bits to use this, as there can be a
performance cost to use 64 bits in cases where 32 would be enough (which means:
spending taxpayer money to heat the atmosphere).

I have three questions about Multi-arch:

1) What is the advantage of adding a new field over simply using something like
   ‘Arch: multi’?

2) On the Ubuntu page I read: “It is worth noting that existing package
   management tools will be unable to interpret and satisfy package relationships
   of this format, even when the desired package is available. Consequently, it is
   recommended to defer use of such package relationships in the archive for a
   full release cycle following the package management implementation.” Does it
   mean that we need to postpone the implementation of multi-arch in perl packages
   containing compiled code until Squeeze + 2, to keep our promise to support
   upgrades from Lenny?


Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan