I wrote my idea first on the irc, but i think here is a better place.
The idea is to give up multiarch repo and make pacman and archlinux capable for real multiarch support
That means u could install a 32bit package from the normal repos core, extra, community usw and not from multilib repo in 64bit arch. (example: pacman -S firefox:i386)
And that means package maintainer don´t have to maintain two 32bit packages, plus all 32bit package where available ob 64bit.
What are u guys thinking, about that ideas. What where the pro and cons, that i don´t see.
Greetings, Ranomier
Hi, IMHO, we already have multiarch support; I come from Debian and I really don't see any substantial difference with what we have in Arch.
OK, in Arch you have to add a repo, but in Debian you have to tell dpkg to accept "i386" as a secondary architecture (# dpkg --add-architecture i386). If you don't do that you don't get multiarch neither in Arch nor in Debian. Everything else is absolutely the same for both users and mantainers: user will still have to explicitly tell the package manager that they want a 32-bit package and mantainers will still have to compile packages for both architectures.
I may be missing something, of course.
Greeting, Eugenio
2014-09-26 1:08 GMT+02:00 Ranomier ranomier@fragomat.net:
I wrote my idea first on the irc, but i think here is a better place.
The idea is to give up multiarch repo and make pacman and archlinux capable for real multiarch support
That means u could install a 32bit package from the normal repos core, extra, community usw and not from multilib repo in 64bit arch. (example: pacman -S firefox:i386)
And that means package maintainer don´t have to maintain two 32bit packages, plus all 32bit package where available ob 64bit.
What are u guys thinking, about that ideas. What where the pro and cons, that i don´t see.
Greetings, Ranomier
The big difference is that we need to maintain a completely separate second set of packages for multilib, while on Debian you use the exact same packages whether i386 is your main architecture or a secondary architecture. For us, the native i686 and x86_64 packages almost always contain the same files cannot be installed at the same time. Multilib packages are modified to only contain the needed i686 parts in another directory (/usr/lib32) while depending on the native x86_64 package for the rest.
On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 8:38 AM, Eugenio M. Vigo emvigo@gmail.com wrote:
Hi, IMHO, we already have multiarch support; I come from Debian and I really don't see any substantial difference with what we have in Arch.
OK, in Arch you have to add a repo, but in Debian you have to tell dpkg to accept "i386" as a secondary architecture (# dpkg --add-architecture i386). If you don't do that you don't get multiarch neither in Arch nor in Debian. Everything else is absolutely the same for both users and mantainers: user will still have to explicitly tell the package manager that they want a 32-bit package and mantainers will still have to compile packages for both architectures.
I may be missing something, of course.
Greeting, Eugenio
2014-09-26 1:08 GMT+02:00 Ranomier ranomier@fragomat.net:
I wrote my idea first on the irc, but i think here is a better place.
The idea is to give up multiarch repo and make pacman and archlinux capable for real multiarch support
That means u could install a 32bit package from the normal repos core, extra, community usw and not from multilib repo in 64bit arch. (example: pacman -S firefox:i386)
And that means package maintainer don´t have to maintain two 32bit packages, plus all 32bit package where available ob 64bit.
What are u guys thinking, about that ideas. What where the pro and cons, that i don´t see.
Greetings, Ranomier
On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 1:08 AM, Ranomier ranomier@fragomat.net wrote:
I wrote my idea first on the irc, but i think here is a better place.
The idea is to give up multiarch repo and make pacman and archlinux capable for real multiarch support
That means u could install a 32bit package from the normal repos core, extra, community usw and not from multilib repo in 64bit arch. (example: pacman -S firefox:i386)
I personally find this approach better and more transparent than what Debian does. I'm not sure how they manage multiarch, but on debian I also cannot tell IF a given program uses 64 bit code at a time. I like how Arch's configuration is consistent and that in any given context, I can be certain it's using the bloated pointer type. I wanted to go as far as calling that approach of Debian names, but it's just not right now fitting into the tone of this email, so I leave that open to the reader.
cheers! mar77i
It is only my experience as normal user. It was not that easy to compile Wine 64 on a Debian multiarch system because of the package dependencies between 32 and 64 bit. The only solution to compile the 32 bit part for Wine on a Debian multiarch system was to create a 32 bit schroot jail. For me as user it was more like using 2 systems to compile one an the same package. Maybe they have fixed stuff in 7.6 but for me it was one of the reasons to install Archlinux.
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