Biarch vs Multiarch

[Simon Richter <sjr@debian.org>]

Hi,

I'm (again) working on the uClibc package, and am unsure on some design
decisions:

 - in dpkg, there are "uclibc-linux-<cpu>" architectures. If uClibc were
   to use these, this would mean that the only "binary" package created
   would be "uclibc-source".

   The alternative would be to do the same thing as the "other"
   alternative C libraries and provide a runtime library package that is
   co-installable with eglibc, and a -dev package that is co-installable
   but requires special compiler flags to be activated.

 - There are no 64 bit equivalents for powerpc, sparc, s390 and
   mips(el). If I want to support 64 bit processes on these systems, I'd
   either need to use a newly created architecture, or create biarch
   packages, which I believe multiarch should supersede. As this is a
   general problem for all libraries, I wonder what is going to be
   Debian's policy in that matter -- are there plans to introduce
   partial arches for these, and if so, before or after squeeze?

Do you have any preferences on these two points?

   Simon