[gentoo-amd64] 32bit and 64bit applications on the same system

[Jean-Marc Hengen]

Hi,

does anyone know, if there has been any progress, getting any package 
manager (portage/paludis/pkgcore) to compile any applications in the 
same root as 64bit and/or 32bit e.g. if I want my firefox as 32bit 
application, then firefox and all it's dependencies get compiled as 32 
bit, but the rest as 64bit. (This would naturally means, that some 
libraries exists as 32bit and 64bit on the same system.)

I searched on the internet and the only thing I found was from paludis: 
"A whole different configuration system, making it far easier to 
maintain multiple systems, some in chroots, with entirely separate 
configuration files." I could mean, that paludis could do it or in some 
future, it could do it, but I found no details about that, so I can't 
say, if this is, what I'm searching for.

If I was simply too dump, to find any documentation/information about 
this topic by myself on the net, it would be kind to point me to those.

The merit of this, would be a) getting rid of the emul-packages b) 
getting any application to work, which only is available for 32bit, 
without needing to maintain a 32bit chroot with all it's drawback. I'm 
especially thinking of older windows games, which run with wine and from 
which I can't separate myself. The only problem is, that wine has itself 
to be 32bit and all it's dependencies. (I'm aware, that wine runs with 
the emul packages. As there exists windows for 64bit, I guess, there 
will be also in the future a 64bit wine for 64bit windows-applications, 
so the current situation won't be permanent.) Just one example, where 
such a future from the package manager would be cool.

The only thing, I've know about it, was that portage dependencies 
implementation isn't designed for such purpose and it would need major 
changes in there, to get portage to do it. I never read something about, 
how file collision are handled, which would be certain, if the same 
package is installed as 32bit and 64bit (e.g. docs).

Greetings,
Jean-Marc
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