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)
- proprietary 32 bit binaries (does Fedora care about them?)- free software with lots of 32 bit assumptions (OpenOffice used to be like this, but IIRC they fixed it ... are there any others?)
- building 32 bit binaries (but really you should use mock or virtualisation, which has other advantages like you can build for lots of other architectures)
Perhaps it's just easier to fix this list of choke-points than to implement working multiarch support?
Rich. -- Emerging Technologies, Red Hat - http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/ Registered Address: Red Hat UK Ltd, Amberley Place, 107-111 Peascod Street, Windsor, Berkshire, SL4 1TE, United Kingdom. Registered in England and Wales under Company Registration No. 03798903
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