[arch-dev-public] The need for /lib64 - testing please

[Allan McRae]

On 01/07/11 18:10, Thomas Bächler wrote:
> Problematic binaries include all utilities that come with
> nvidia-settings, the entire virtualbox binary distribution, or any other
> binary-only 64 bit application. By removing this symlink, we will
> completely break compatibility with third-party binaries. This will
> never change, so I don't see the point in your experiment.
>
> We could have a special "x86-64-binary-compat" package including only
> this symlink, and have binary packages depend on it. That seems like
> overkill though.


Well, that was sort of what I was thinking as I had seen elsewhere other 
"pure 64" bit distros discussing only having that /lib64 symlink in a 
separate compatibility package (keeping / nice and clean...).  So my 
thinking was to see how widespread the affected binary blobs were. 
Also, I have seen at least one binary blob using 
/lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 instead of /lib32, I thought thinks might be 
shifting...  Probably not given your comment regarding SuSE.

Given I did not think about nvidia-settings and its widespread use, I 
agree that this whole thing would be overkill.

Allan