Re: multiarch/bi-arch status (ETA) question
Stephan Seitz <nur-ab-sal@gmx.de> writes:
> On Wed, Jul 06, 2005 at 08:45:43AM -0400, Stephen Frost wrote:
>>you've described. You havn't given any reason why a user would have any
>>use for it. There are quite a few reasons why trying to do such would
>
> Hm, normally, I wouldn't need a firefox with flash plugin or a
> mplayer/xine with old codecs, so I would use the 64bit version. But
> sometimes I need flash, the realplayer or old video codecs.
> Of course I could build a chroot, but then I wouldn't need multiarch.
>
> So why don't create /usr/bin/i386 and /usr/bin/amd64 and populate
> /usr/bin with symlinks to the programs. You could build something like
> update-alternative, so admins can switch between the 32bit and 64bit
> version as default.
>
> Shade and sweet water!
>
> Stephan
Because there are so very few plugin using programs that need that at
all and changing 16K packages just so maybe 20 packages don't have to
do something special is rather pointless.
Feel free to change mplayer to use /usr/bin/i386 and /usr/bin/amd64 or
use mplayer.i386 and mplayer.amd64 and an alternative for mplayer. The
change is easy to make for packages that need it and realy useless for
everything else.
We are not saying you shouldn't make binaries coinstallable for
multiple archs, we are only saying we won't make this a policy. It is
left to each package maintainer to decide if he wants to make the
multiarch change for his binary too or not and nearly every one will
not.
The only binaries people wanted in 32/64 bit so far are all plugin
using binaries where the plugins are only available in 32bit. A very
small subset of all packages.
MfG
Goswin
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