[gentoo-amd64] amd64 list, still useful? Was: btrfs

[Duncan]

Frank Peters posted on Thu, 29 May 2014 17:05:26 -0400 as excerpted:

> There may not be any amd64 issues, but there certainly are a lot of
> gripes.
>
> For those who operate a pure 64-bit system (no multi-lib), there is a
> fair amount of highly useful software that has not yet been updated to
> be 64-bit clean.  For example, Adobe PDF Reader, Foxit PDF Reader, and
> the Intel ICC compiler are still 32-bit.  I wish these folks would get
> with the modern trends.

FWIW, I'm no-multilib as well, but I guess for a different reason.

I don't do proprietary and in general couldn't even if I wanted to, since 
I cannot and will not agree to the EULAs, so non-free software that 
hasn't been amd64 ported is of no concern to me, except that it's yet 
another case where authors chose not to respect my rights, so I simply 
don't use their software.

Meanwhile, all the software I actually use has long since been ported, 
and I no longer even use grub-static, since I've switched to grub2, which 
builds just fine on amd64.

So there's literally no reason for me to run multilib at all, and in 
fact, when I switched over some years ago, I had already had various 
problems due to the 32-bit side which I never used except to build 
toolchain 32-bit support, breaking.  As a result, simply switching to no-
multilib significantly decomplicated life and resulted in far faster gcc 
and glibc rebuilds as well, and there was literally no down side 
whatsoever, except that I had to run grub-static for a couple years.

Tho I do still have a 32-bit chroot as the build-root for my 32-bit only 
netbook.

But by policy I don't keep anything private on the netbook and actually 
don't use it as a NET-book anyway, only connecting it via ethernet here 
at home. (I never did get the wifi working on it, I tried at one point, 
but apparently there was some bug in the kernel wifi driver at that point 
and I couldn't connect, and I simply never bothered since.)  So security 
isn't a huge deal on it, and I actually haven't updated it in a couple 
years now, to the point that I'd have severe problems updating it using a 
current gentoo tree due to EAPI upgrade issues, so I'd have to do 
staggered updates using archived trees.

At this point that means I'll probably just do a full from-stage3-rebuild 
at some point... if I even bother at all.  I might actually just hardware 
upgrade to a 64-bit machine, such that I can use my main system's binpkgs 
for both machines.

Meanwhile, Mark's reason for staying on this list, as opposed to the 
general user list, are more or less mine, as well.  I never actually saw 
the negatives he saw there, and there was a time when there was an attack 
on me here, which I'll never forget as it was quite an experience seeing 
other regulars and lurkers too come out of the woodwork to defend me. I 
knew a lot of folks liked my posts due to thanks now and again, but WOW, 
I had no idea I had benefitted THAT many lurkers along with the others, 
and it was quite humbling indeed to see them post perhaps their only post 
in years, to defend me!  Certainly a life-changing experience!

Rather, in my case it is more that I remember the high traffic of the 
user list and kind of like the lower but perhaps higher quality traffic 
here, tho at times it's /too/ low traffic, these days.  Probably at some 
point I'll get back to the user list, but if this list were to shut down, 
I'd still miss it, because while there's not a lot of traffic here these 
days, the signal to noise ratio really is about the highest I can imagine.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman