[gentoo-amd64] real multilib support

[gentoo-amd64] real multilib support

[Simon Cooper]

Whats the status of real, proper, compiled multilib support? Is it
'being worked on'? Whats the main things holding it back at the moment?

TheCoop
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Re: [gentoo-amd64] real multilib support

[Olivier Crête]

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On Thu, 2007-22-03 at 15:37 +0000, Simon Cooper wrote:
> Whats the status of real, proper, compiled multilib support? Is it
> 'being worked on'? Whats the main things holding it back at the moment?

The big missing element is proper portage support. Since it will have to
maintain parallel dep trees for the difference architectures. And since
portage is a complicated beast, I don't think any significant work has
been done in that direction.

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Olivier Crête
tester@gentoo.org
Gentoo Developer

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[gentoo-amd64] Re: real multilib support

[Duncan]

Olivier Crête <tester@gentoo.org> posted
1174586568.5958.1.camel@localhost, excerpted below, on  Thu, 22 Mar 2007
14:02:47 -0400:

> On Thu, 2007-22-03 at 15:37 +0000, Simon Cooper wrote:
>> Whats the status of real, proper, compiled multilib support? Is it
>> 'being worked on'? Whats the main things holding it back at the moment?
> 
> The big missing element is proper portage support. Since it will have to
> maintain parallel dep trees for the difference architectures. And since
> portage is a complicated beast, I don't think any significant work has
> been done in that direction.

FWIW, there had been efforts in that direction, but they had been shelved 
for the time being due to the complexity and difficulty of introducing 
such a major new feature into portage without breaking existing working 
and depended upon code.  The story, even a short version, is long and 
complex and fraught with nasty politics, but ultimately comes to the 
still fresh (last few days) announcement of the first public draft of 
PMS, the package manager spec.  Once package manager API-0 is defined and 
adopted, and the council has made it a priority now so within a few 
months seems reasonable, it'll break a log jam that has been holding up 
all /sorts/ of stuff, including not only major features in portage 
itself, but the development of portage alternatives such as pkgcore and 
paludis as well.  The next 18 months or so could be /very/ interesting, 
as major new Gentoo tree and package manager features like full working 
multilib support that has been frozen for literally years, finally 
becomes possible to practically implement, as this log jam breaks up.

For more info, check the dev list, or look around some of the developer 
blogs.

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Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: real multilib support

[Thomas Rösner]

Hi,

Duncan schrieb:
> Olivier Crête <tester@gentoo.org> posted
> 1174586568.5958.1.camel@localhost, excerpted below, on  Thu, 22 Mar 2007
> 14:02:47 -0400:
>
>   
>> On Thu, 2007-22-03 at 15:37 +0000, Simon Cooper wrote:
>>     
>>> Whats the status of real, proper, compiled multilib support? Is it
>>> 'being worked on'? Whats the main things holding it back at the moment?
>>>       
>> The big missing element is proper portage support. Since it will have to
>> maintain parallel dep trees for the difference architectures. And since
>> portage is a complicated beast, I don't think any significant work has
>> been done in that direction.
>>     
>
> FWIW, there had been efforts in that direction, but they had been shelved 
> for the time being due to the complexity and difficulty of introducing 
> such a major new feature into portage without breaking existing working 
> and depended upon code.  [...]
> For more info, check the dev list, or look around some of the developer 
> blogs.
>   

Do you have any pointers? My -dev archives are too young it seems, and 
google spits out much unrelated stuff.

Regards,
    Thomas

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Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: real multilib support

[Kevin F. Quinn]

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On Tue, 27 Mar 2007 11:08:26 +0200
Thomas Rösner <Thomas.Roesner@digital-trauma.de> wrote:

> My -dev archives are too young it seems,
> and google spits out much unrelated stuff.

http://archives.gentoo.org

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Kevin F. Quinn

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[gentoo-amd64] Re: real multilib support

[Duncan]

"Kevin F. Quinn" <kevquinn@gentoo.org> posted
20070327145343.76dd4df8@c1358217.kevquinn.com, excerpted below, on  Tue,
27 Mar 2007 14:53:43 +0200:

> On Tue, 27 Mar 2007 11:08:26 +0200
> Thomas Rösner <Thomas.Roesner@digital-trauma.de> wrote:
> 
>> My -dev archives are too young it seems, and google spits out much
>> unrelated stuff.
> 
> http://archives.gentoo.org

The immediate reference was to the PMS draft announcement on dev, which 
as I said is less than a week old, so unless someone is /just/ 
subscribing to dev now, the "too young" reference shouldn't apply to it 
specifically.  However, there's a long and politicized history on portage 
features and portage alternatives going back some years and involving by 
dragging them in virtually any of the huge threads (say more than 50 or 
100 posts) going back years... to early 2004 I think at least, that being 
when I got involved with Gentoo, and probably earlier.  Thus, the history 
is there for anyone wanting to trace the how and why of where we are 
today thru the various events and controversies leading to it.

As for archives, in addition to the official Gentoo archive linked above, 
there's the gmane.org list archive, with both web and news interface 
options.  All the mailing lists I participate in (this one included) are 
done using pan (my preferred NNTP client), thru the news interface and 
list2news gateway at news.gmane.org.  It doesn't expire posts, so it's 
possible to subscribe to a "group" there, and pull headers back to at 
least the time the list was added to gmane (and often earlier, clear back 
to list inception, if there's some archive of posts they can be imported 
from).  If one desires, one can then search this list of posts as 
downloaded from gmane, with any of the conventional local file search 
tools.

http://gmane.org , for more information on it and a list of lists carried.

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Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: real multilib support

[Thomas Rösner]

Duncan schrieb:
> "Kevin F. Quinn" <kevquinn@gentoo.org> posted
> 20070327145343.76dd4df8@c1358217.kevquinn.com, excerpted below, on  Tue,
> 27 Mar 2007 14:53:43 +0200:
>
>   
>> On Tue, 27 Mar 2007 11:08:26 +0200
>> Thomas Rösner <Thomas.Roesner@digital-trauma.de> wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> My -dev archives are too young it seems, and google spits out much
>>> unrelated stuff.
>>>       
>> http://archives.gentoo.org
>>     

No search.

>
> The immediate reference was to the PMS draft announcement on dev, which 
> as I said is less than a week old, so unless someone is /just/ 
> subscribing to dev now, the "too young" reference shouldn't apply to it 
> specifically.

I didn't see the statements you cited there, that's why I asked. I'll 
just look again.

Regards,
    Thomas

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Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: real multilib support

[Kevin F. Quinn]

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On Wed, 28 Mar 2007 23:24:15 +0200
Thomas Rösner <Thomas.Roesner@digital-trauma.de> wrote:

> > "Kevin F. Quinn" <kevquinn@gentoo.org> posted
> >> http://archives.gentoo.org
> 
> No search.

Yes search.

Add "site:archives.gentoo.org" and so on to your Google searches.

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Kevin F. Quinn

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[gentoo-amd64] Re: real multilib support

[Duncan]

Thomas Rösner <Thomas.Roesner@digital-trauma.de> posted
460ADCFF.9090009@digital-trauma.de, excerpted below, on  Wed, 28 Mar 2007
23:24:15 +0200:

> I didn't see the statements you cited there, that's why I asked. I'll
> just look again.

Thread:

Subject:  ANN: PMS public release
From: Stephan Bennett <spb@gentoo.org>
Date: Sund, 25 Mar 2007 02:33:50 +0100
Message-ID: <20070325023350.7b5c7485@blashyrk>

The gmane permalink:
Archived-At: <http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/47299>

There's not a lot of discussion there, however, only a few responses, 
mostly saying good job so far.  The interesting stuff is in the history, 
for which as I said earlier, just about any thread with say 50 or more 
responses going back several years (particularly if ciaranm posted to it, 
directly related or not, as that's where a lot of the politics comes in, 
still trying to be neutral but for better or for worse, his posts seem to 
be lightening rods, I doubt many will disagree with that).

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Re: [gentoo-amd64] real multilib support

[Thomas Rösner]

Simon Cooper schrieb:
> Whats the status of real, proper, compiled multilib support? Is it
> 'being worked on'? Whats the main things holding it back at the moment?
>   

Portage can't track ABI dependencies. Extending portage right now is 
hard, and a EAPI 0 spec is coming around. From reading -dev I get the 
sense that the portage devs want to wait with adding features to portage 
until that's done.

Does paludis do ABI tracking? Or pkgcore? The paludis hp only says 
something about chroots.

Regards,
    Thomas
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Re: [gentoo-amd64] real multilib support

[Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.]

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On Thursday 22 March 2007, Thomas Rösner <Thomas.Roesner@digital-trauma.de> 
wrote about 'Re: [gentoo-amd64] real multilib support':
> Simon Cooper schrieb:
> > Whats the status of real, proper, compiled multilib support? Is it
> > 'being worked on'? Whats the main things holding it back at the
> > moment?
>
> Portage can't track ABI dependencies. Extending portage right now is
> hard, and a EAPI 0 spec is coming around. From reading -dev I get the
> sense that the portage devs want to wait with adding features to portage
> until that's done.
>
> Does paludis do ABI tracking?

From what I understand, they are waiting on the EAPI spec before starting 
work on this.  0.20.1 doesn't appear to have any ABI tracking related 
features that I can see, although it may be possible to fake with 
sophisticated hooks+bashrc.

> The paludis hp only says 
> something about chroots.

It is much easier to convince paludis to build packages for a chroot from 
outside the chroot than it is to convince portage to do the same thing, 
but that's a rather minor feature, and requires some configuration-file 
discipline.

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Re: [gentoo-amd64] real multilib support

[Kevin F. Quinn]

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On Thu, 22 Mar 2007 15:37:52 +0000
Simon Cooper <thecoop@runbox.com> wrote:

> Whats the status of real, proper, compiled multilib support? Is it
> 'being worked on'?

You might be interested in:

http://dev.gentoo.org/~kanaka/auto-multilib/

which doesn't need ABI dependencies - ABI dependencies and
associated tracking could turn out to be a bit of a nightmare in
practice.  Kanaka explains some of the reasons why.

> Whats the main things holding it back at the moment?

My guess would be that there's no desperate need for it.  The existing
workarounds; i.e. chroots, emul packages etc work well enough for the
amd64/x86 pair anyway.

-- 
Kevin F. Quinn

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Re: [gentoo-amd64] real multilib support

[Thomas Rösner]

Hi,

Kevin F. Quinn schrieb:
> On Thu, 22 Mar 2007 15:37:52 +0000
> Simon Cooper <thecoop@runbox.com> wrote:
>
>   
>> Whats the status of real, proper, compiled multilib support? Is it
>> 'being worked on'?
>>     
>
> You might be interested in:
>
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~kanaka/auto-multilib/
>
> which doesn't need ABI dependencies - ABI dependencies and
> associated tracking could turn out to be a bit of a nightmare in
> practice.  Kanaka explains some of the reasons why.
>   

The doc there doesn't get me too excited, however. I don't want to drag 
a 32bit userland around for /every/ ebuild that has multilib support. 
Perhaps this is more useful if combined with useflag dependencies (which 
are about to come in portage and are in paludis) - that way you'd never 
bother to set one of the ABI useflags, but ebuilds could depend on 32bit 
versions of libraries. Things like installing gtk+ themes for the 32bit 
gtk libs, too, would be the only thing you'd have to specify manually 
that way.

>> Whats the main things holding it back at the moment?
>>     
>
> My guess would be that there's no desperate need for it.  The existing
> workarounds; i.e. chroots, emul packages etc work well enough for the
> amd64/x86 pair anyway.
>   

They "sort of" work, yes. But currently Gentoo isn't using the amd64-x86 
compatibility to it's full potential. You'd think it's easier for a 
source based distro to do this, but right now changes to portage are 
harder than they should be (I agree with ciaranm on this one without 
even looking to hard at the portage code, the time features spend in the 
queue just speaks for itself). This is an area where portage 
alternatives really could shine, funnily I don't see them picking this 
up at all.

Well, at least the current state of multilib keeps me from installing to 
much non-free software. I collect some GNU/karma points that way ;-).

Regards,
    Thomas


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