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(I may be misguided in some of this because I've never actually used Gentoo.) |
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I plan on switching Gentoo soon on my AMD64 machine. I haven't yet found a |
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distro that handled 32-bit compatibility well (debian's way just sounds |
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pointless, fedora fails miserably, SuSE is decent), but it seems like |
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Gentoo has the potential to do very well. Here's an idea: |
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For each ebuild (slot), portage would allow multiple architectures to be |
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"installed." One would be "master" -- this works normally. Everything |
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thereafter would be a "compat" install or something -- only libraries (that |
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is, files that do not exist in the master) would get installed. |
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So: |
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foo - AMD64 (master) installs /usr/bin/foo, /etc/foo.conf, and |
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/usr/lib64/libfoo.so |
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foo - x86 (compat) installs only /usr/lib/libfoo.so |
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Then packages should by default depend on their own arch's version. |
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Furthermore, a "default" arch should be selectable, so that, if amd64 was |
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default, x86's gtk would depend on amd64's gtk, and amd64's would be |
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installed as master. A tool to switch from x86 master to amd64 master (by |
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remerging both) would be nice, as ebuilds will be gradually fixed to work |
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on amd64. |
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Some provision for arch-independant ebuilds would also help. |
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With a feature like this, I want to be able to do: |
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# emerge --arch x86 gtk |
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so that I can run some 32-bit binary. I then want |
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# emerge --arch amd64 --master gtk |
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to build the amd64 version and replace any executables that the x86 build |
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may have installed, so x86 becomes the slave. |
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Is something like this reasonable? |
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--Andy |
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-- |
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