multilib fun - devel packages

[Jakub Jelinek]

On Mon, Dec 12, 2005 at 11:42:20AM +0100, Florian La Roche wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 10, 2005 at 12:32:26AM +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
> > On Fri, 2005-12-09 at 19:55 +0100, Matthias Saou wrote:
> > > Let me ask a silly question here : Why do we want to encourage people to
> > > build 32bit stuff on 64bit installs?
> > 
> > On PPC we use mostly 32-bit packages, because 64-bit is fairly pointless
> > for most things. The choice of ppc32 vs. ppc64 isn't the same as the
> > choice of ia32 vs. amd64, because in the ppc case the 32-bit option is
> > still actually a sane architecture with a sane number of registers --
> > whereas on amd64 you gain more by using the extra registers than you
> > lose to the natural inefficiency of 64-bit code.
> 
> 
> Even on ppc we kind of move slowly over to use more and more 64bit apps,
> as multilib on power prefers 64bit applications over the 32bit ones.

But that's just rpm bug, it shouldn't always prefer 64bit rpms over 32bit
ones, instead decide based on how it was configured.
For x86_64, it should be obviously defined to prefer 64bit, I think
on s390x similarly (there 64-bit code can do direct calls rather than
go through the literal pool all the time etc.).  On ppc and sparc
it should on the other side prefer 32bit rpms over 64bit.

	Jakub