Re: Issues with trying to build Debian x32 gcc with multilib support

[Matthias Klose <doko@debian.org>]

On 27.08.2012 17:16, Daniel Schepler wrote:
> I've finally gotten the tri-arch compilers building on all three
> architectures, and updated
> http://people.debian.org/~schepler/gcc-4.7-x32/ with the resulting
> packages.
> 
> Let me take one more shot at convincing you of migrating the
> *-multilib and source packages to using multiarch (after wheezy
> releases, of course): With the current situation, anyone who needs
> both multiarch libraries and gcc-multilib will necessarily end up with
> two copies of 32-bit [e]glibc on their system, libc6-i386 and
> libc6:i386.  That seems like needless duplication in a fairly common
> situation.

there is a lot more duplication in GCC packaging, like building various
front-ends from separate source packages, which does help other things like less
complex package migrations. So duplicating things isn't that bad.

Having dependencies on non-default arch packages means that these have to be
available in the very same version, or else you won't be able to install or
upgrade.  This is the kind of thing I do not want to see.

So there should be always a way to build and install a gcc-multilib without any
non-default arch packages. So if you want to work on this, then please make the
dependencies look like 'lib32gcc1 | libgcc1:i386' and make sure that the 32 and
64 bit packages are built on x32 too.

And somebody who installs gcc-multilib usually doesn't care about the extra files.

  Matthias