Re: powerpc64, multiarch vs biarch and etch ...

[Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>]

Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org> writes:

> On Wed, 31 May 2006, Sven Luther wrote:
>> > In the last 6 months we had:
>> > - multiarch support added to ld by Aurelien jarno
>> 
>> And Aurelien Jarno telling us he was sick of nothing happening in early april,
>> and wanting to drop it all. And apparently some of his multi-arch proposals
>> was refused by the ftp-masters, or so azeem told me yesterday.
>
> Aurelien didn't want to drop "multiarch" but didn't want to push it
> further because it was too much work for him and he's busy enough already.
> The only thing that has been refused is the libc-bin package which I'm
> confident will come back soon since the discussion on -devel resulted in a
> consensus "it should be safe if done properly".

He told me he will only reupload it if ftp-master says they will
accept it now. He doesn't want to waste time on a hopeless cause.

>> > - a report from HP/Canonical about how to go forward
>> 
>> Indeed, i heard rumors of it not having very much content apart from tollef's
>> work which is nothing really new.
>
> What about reading it and being constructive instead of relying on rumors?
>
> It is indeed more a summary than something completely new but it does help
> however. The suggestion solution is also a long term solution (dpkg
> 2.0)... which clearly is not going to happen for etch.

And not for etch+1 or probably etch+2 and there still remains the
problem of an upgrade path.

>> > - another proposition from Goswin van Brederlow (see his recent work and
>> >   bugreports on -dpkg)
>> 
>> Yes, but what is needed if we want multi-arch in etch we need things to go
>> forward.  The freeze is in 2 month from now, and there is load of work to be
>> done to make the packages multi-arch ready, rebuild all the archive or part of
>> it, find all the bugs in them, etc.
>
> Everybody understands that we're not going to have full multi-arch support
> for etch. Goswin tries to push some required changes to dpkg that will
> allow a smooth transition to multi-arch package in etch+1.

I tried pushing in full multiarch but it gets delayed at every
corner. There can't be any progress if it takes over a year to push a
2 line patch into binutils.

>> There are patches to dpkg, to the toolchain, etc, but the step from plan to
>> actual implementation has not be done.
>
> So help the people interested in doing it instead of complaining that it's
> the fault of the release team. The release team doesn't own Debian, they
> merely define a reasonable timeframe for changes that other developers
> want to push through.
>
> And multiarch lacked (for a long time) a bit of momentum. It goes better
> now, but it's clearly too late for etch.

The ability to NMU packages would have added a hell of a lot of
momentum. That would have been the help the release team could have
given.

MfG
        Goswin