I just felt like interjecting after having been reading up on this
tread. The whole multiarch situation is exactly why my workstation was
re-installed with FC5's x86_64 from the old Debian amd64 distro. Someday
when Debian has multiarch I'll switch it back but for now all my 64 bit
machines are running FC5 because it works a hell of a lot better than
Debian right now.
While there are definitely differences between the packaging formats
it would appear that a solution for this is out there and from reading
the thread sounds like people want to make it more difficult than it
possibly is. Or maybe I'm just seeing that and it's really that people
think it's too difficult so it won't be worth the effort. Who knows!
Looking through my FC5 I can easily tell the 32-bit libraries as they're
the ones installed under paths like /usr/lib and /lib64 while the 64-bit
libraries are the ones in /usr/lib64 and /lib64. If I run 'file *' while
in /usr/bin I find binaries that are both 64- and 32-bit side-by-side.
Granted most are 64-bit only and only a few are 32-bit only, but there
are a couple that are both in which case most are support binaries and
have a suffix of either -32 or -64 to their names. The ones that fall
into this latter category are things like gdk-pixbuf-query-loaders,
gtk-query-immodules and pango-querymodules. The nice thing is I have no
problem grabbing a i386 package and installing it or even a 64-bit
package that makes use of 32-bit libraries.
The solution is out there and I think it's probably much simplier
than it's being made out to be if it really becomes a high priority for
Debian.
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