Re: [gentoo-amd64] real multilib support

["Thomas Rösner" <Thomas.Roesner@digital-trauma.de>]

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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