On 7/5/05, David Wood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > It took a startlingly small amount of effort in the kernel.
Not sure about small, but it works very well. Yes, if only userspace was just as easy... > If we were starting from a blank slate, we can have the rest > with a tiny change in our naming scheme, a bit of package metadata, and > some trivial code enhancements. Agreed. > If the sticking point is that it will take > some effort to enhance our _existing_ packages/package system, hey, we > have this excellent migration plan that doesn't commit us to anything, and > allows us to work on the new system while the old one works fine... However, we do not start with a blank slate. Rather, people expect that "Linux programs" also work on Debian. And since AMD64 is touted as a "compatible" improvement, of course they expect full compatibility. The initiative has been taken by other distributions, and I don't see a viable alternative to follow their approach. That means /usr/lib for 32bit libs and /usr/lib64 for the 64bit libs. Yes, it is ugly, but it is close to inevitable. I would prefer architecture neutral file positions very much (/usr/bin/i386 for binaries, /usr/lib/i386 for libraries etc), but I don't see how that can be "compatible" with RedHat/SuSUE. But maybe we are taking the wrong approach, and a little bit of path magic in ld.so/dlopen would solve the problem? Thomas