On Sun, 2007-03-18 at 14:57 +0100, Axel Thimm wrote: > 36% of FC6/ppc Core are shipped as 64 bit packages, which means that > there is quite often the demand/desire to do so. It is very unlikely > that the demand in Extras is 0. > > The fact that Extras didn't build/ship 64 bits for ppc was probably > more a technical one, but since the worlds unite, anything that was > possible with a former Core package will be possible with a former > Extras package, too. > > 36% also indicates that not all ppc packages make sense to build as 64 > bits, but rather about a third. This looks like the packagers need to > decide on a package by package basis and communicate this to the > buildsystem, either by the package database or some metafile in the > sources. But since this mechanism has to have been available to Core, > we just need to let packagers know how to trigger this, if they want > it. Currently it's just a rather crappy heuristic -- "does it have a -devel subpackage?". That worked well enough as a first attempt, but it's not really good enough. Ideally, I think we want a new RPM tag for it, and it can be specified in the specfile. The package author can then specify whether the package should be shipped for the secondary arch (i386 on x86_64, or ppc64 on ppc64), and even whether the secondary version should be _favoured_ (64-bit gdb on ppc64). There are those who make coherent arguments that we should prevent RPM from allowing multilib installations of packages with 'conflicting' executable files in /usr/bin. Instead of just 'foo' and 'foo-devel', we should have 'foo', 'foo-libs', and 'foo-devel' packages. The stuff in /usr/bin should be in 'foo' and you should have _one_ version installed, not two. Firefox is a prime example of where we got this wrong, shipping it in ppc64 form because it had a -devel subpackage, and shipping both executables _and_ libraries in the 'firefox' package instead of splitting into 'firefox' and 'firefox-libs' packages. We're fixing that when we switch to xulrunner. After a clean install on ppc64, I really shouldn't have _any_ 64-bit binaries in /usr/bin other than gdb and maybe one or two similar tools which actually need to be 64-bit, like strace. This is obviously something to be addressed after the F7 release. -- dwmw2 -- Fedora-maintainers mailing list Fedora-maintainers@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-maintainers -- Fedora-maintainers-readonly mailing list Fedora-maintainers-readonly@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-maintainers-readonly
