Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
My gripe with it is the pimping of AMD. It's a different class than i386, since there you only have one letter and not the whole name, and historical errors should not prevent us from doing the right thing today. (Else, all linux ports should be renamed to linux-$ARCH, which I don't think they should (pre-multiarch, at least. ;))
My memory tells me that "a64" is the name of an ARM-derived architecture. Don't even be tempted.
Currently, if I want to run the architecture, I _have_ to buy the processor from AMD. Odd that we want to have the technical name indicate what processor you need to acquire in order to get it to work.
The real reason why the current name for the arch is vendor specific is because, if you recall, AMD invited Intel to sign up for a vendor neutral name that they could both use ... and thereby avoid confusing differentiation in the marketplace. Intel refused, which indicates to me that Intel _wants_ us to use two different names for the respective architectures. If we are going to take vendor preferences into account in any way whatsoever, we should take _both_ vendors (the real one with products and the virtual one that has only released marketing literature) into account ...
I propose that politicizers of this argument take the _correct_ approach to _their_ perceived problem:
1. Shut up whining until there is a non-AMD processor available2. Read up the documentation on what Intel is going to do different (eg execute bit) 3. Start a second porting project for whatever Intel's name is at release time
4. When multiarch comes along, the two will be mostly interoperable anyway Just another $0.02 ... this is getting expensive ... Alex.