Re: how to support 32- & 64-bit versions of libraries

[Helmut Grohne <helmut@subdivi.de>]

Hi Steve,

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 03:11:00AM -0500, Steve M. Robbins wrote:
> For package "gmp", I have two open requests to provide 64-bit versions
> of the libraries on ppc.  One of the requests also asks for a 32-bit
> version on amd64.

I'd like to see 32bit libs for amd64, too. :-)

> Is this related to "biarch" or "multiarch"?  I can not find any
> information on the former, while the wiki page on the latter [1] has a
> lot of old design proposals, but no current status?  Can someone
> summarize the status of these things?

Things that have been said about biarch or multiarch often are about
changes to the package system (especially dpkg) to better support these
cases (yours, but also optimizing for special processors). Currently the
common approach taken (at least for 32bit on amd64) is to provide a new
package. So taking ncurses as an example there is not only libncurses5,
but also a lib32ncurses5 package. Similarly there are libasound2 and
lib32asound2. I suggest you to have a look at these.

Helmut