Bug#187407: ITP: qemu -- Userspace x86 (ia32) Linux emulator.

[Paul Russell <prussell@debian.org>]

On Thursday 03 April 2003 09:13, Anthony Towns wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 03, 2003 at 08:45:07AM +0200, Paul Russell wrote:
> > * Package name    : qemu
> >   Version         : 0.14
> >   Upstream Author : Fabrice Bellard <fabrice.bellard@free.fr>
> > * URL             : http://www.some.org/
>
> http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/ seems to be a better URL than the
> "So Others Might Eat" program for Washington, D.C.

Thanks, will fix that in final description.

> Do you have any idea how users will install i386 programs (like wine)
> on their powerpc boxes? (Presumably it's a similar issue to running i386
> packages on ia64, which doesn't even need a processor emulator)

I've been working with the author to ensure that non-modified glibc etc
can work.  That is done (as of 0.16).

One option is to do this installation entirely under /usr/gnemul/qemu-i386/,
but that doesn't scale (because having a huge number of files here will
slow qemu's start time to a crawl).  The second option is to use the "if 
package of same name installed on native system, install it in 
/usr/gnemul/qemu-i386/, otherwise install in root".

I think that a dpkg wrapper, which cuts in when the package being
operated on is called "xxx-i386", and mangles non-native debs into
that name, might work in the short term.  Eventually, "apt-get -mi386 install 
wine" would be nice, but that may be a while 8)
-- 
Thankyou for your mail.