Multiarch crazyiness
Hans de Goede
j.w.r.degoede at hhs.nl
Mon Oct 22 14:46:52 UTC 2007
Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> Jon Masters wrote:
>> It's still going to be the case that many people will want packages from
>> both, for a long time, and in some cases that makes more sense - it's
>> not always better to have 64-bit versions.
>>
>> For these reasons, I think a better solution is needed, and needed as a
>> matter of urgency. That solution should also be well documented, with
>> very obvious policy document(s) - not just mailing list posts - that
>> make it very easy for package maintainers to understand. It really is
>> time to fix this properly - can we get a working group setup?
>
> My original question was to some extent taking the position of devil's
> advocate.
>
> But I think this is interesting: what are the actual choke-points which
> cause ordinary Fedora users to need to use 32 bit libs & apps on their
> 64 bit x86-64 machines?
>
> Off the top of my head I could think of:
>
> - proprietary firefox plugins (could probably be handled using a
> wrapper, in fact _should_ be handled using a wrapper because dlopening
> binary-only plugins in your browser is stupid)
>
I fully agree, but that wrapper needs 32 bits libraries both for its own
plugin-loader part and to satisfy the deps of the plugin.
> - proprietary 32 bit binaries (does Fedora care about them?)
>
Well, we just fixed glibc to make googleearth work (although that was really a
glibc bug), and I'm sure I can think of others like erm, matlab, maple,
labview, picasse to name a few.
> - free software with lots of 32 bit assumptions (OpenOffice used to be
> like this, but IIRC they fixed it ... are there any others?)
>
warzone2100 to name one, wine is another small player in this area.
> Perhaps it's just easier to fix this list of choke-points than to
> implement working multiarch support?
32 bit is not going away, I share your wishes, but really it is not going to go
away anytime soon.
Regards,
Hans
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