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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