Re: [gentoo-dev] packages which won't support x32

[Walter Dnes]

On Sat, Oct 06, 2012 at 11:06:04AM -0700, Diego Elio Petten?? wrote

> Nothing stops you from doing that. But if you want them to load from a
> non x32-ABI application, no way. As I said on my blog before, the big
> problem is that x32 is neither x86-64 nor x86 binary compatible (if they
> bumped x86 ABI that would have helped) so there is no way to cross-load
> or cross-call any more than you can load a 32-bit library on a 64-bit
> application or vice versa.
>
> Of course you could build Chrome for amd64 as well. And Qt5 while you're
> at it. And KDE. And since you'll also have Skype (32-bit) you'll be
> wondering where the memory saving boasted by the ricers (on forums and
> so on) is, given that you're loading three libcs, three libssl, two Qt
> (as right now) and I don't know many more duplicates...

  In other words, all or nothing.  An x32 distro is technically
possible, but it would require every last single binary/library/object
file/etc *INCLUDING PROPRIETARY PROGRAMS AND BINARY BLOBS* to be x32 and
only, and no multilib stuff.  If amd64 did not support multilib and
plugin-wrappers, it would be a lot less common today.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@××××××××.org>
I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications