On the port side: - All arch64 developers should read this: http://dev.gentoo.org/~plasmaroo/devmanual/archs/amd64/ "Applying |-fPIC| on all objects will slow down the binaries in a drastic way." So I will drop it again from the default CFLAGS. A new pacman package is needed. I'll do this later when we are sure how the future development will be. - So we need to review all packages for sorting out packages that will build *.so files. That's how I understand the Gentoo rule. Am I right? We can use a script crawling through /* for *.so | pacman -Qo to get the packages we need to patch with CFLAGS="$CFLAGS -fPIC" ??? Who can do this first? Then check the result against Gentoo and Fedora. - Then a recompile of the whole distro will be needed. makeworld will be my friend :) I hope this will solve our last problems with the iso(mkfs.ext3, lilo, grub) What I expect from the official archlinux developers side: - Jason, I've come to the conclusion that a common cvs and common pkgbuilds are not good for getting the ports accepted. It would take us a long time until i686 developers will accept bloated pkgbuilds and preparing the "arch" tag would take its time. I still don't know why we should need the "arch" tag. I think it would be only to declare if the pkgbuild builds on a certain architecture. But as long as the packages are build by a packager and not automatically we don't really need it. - I disagree to your opinion that i686 packagers will ever be able to build packages for the ports using pacbuild. Every package needs a check and real installation on the destination architecture before you can upload it to the repos. So you always will need to have a few packagers more for each port to check packages and play with bugfixes. - So I would prefer a separate svn/cvs for each port. Every port should be free to decide what packages to include into the port. This may not be as elegant as common cvs+pkgbuild but it's much easier to handle. - No changes would be need to pacman/makepkg. Less work and less learning for all - more KISS for everyone. And it will not take more space on the servers or something like that. So setup a separate svn for arch64 and create new subrepos for x86_64 and give a few of us access - we could start tomorrow! I know some arch64 devs dying to do real productiv stuff. Otherwise as I told you more packagers will leave the port. AndyRTR