Hi David, On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 12:00:38AM +0200, David Henningsson wrote: > On 2011-08-16 20:46, Steve Langasek wrote: > >As part of the work to eliminate ia32-libs in favor of multiarch library > >installation > >(https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/foundations-o-multiarch-next-steps), > >i386 sources have been enabled by default on amd64 systems in oneiric. For > >new installs, this is done by default in alpha-3 and above; and as of today, > >update-manager also ensures that i386 multiarch support is enabled by > >default on upgrade from natty.
> I'm sure this is all great and something many people have been > waited eagerly for, but for my own part I must say I have missed the > newbie introduction wiki/blog, or "Multiarch for dummies". [1] Yes, the information so far has not been targeted at end users because there hasn't been anything for users to directly *use* until now. I'm intending to put something in the beta release notes about this. I also gave a talk at DebConf about multiarch (slides[1], video[2]), which briefly covers the "why bother?" aspect among other things; and there's <http://wiki.debian.org/Multiarch/TheCaseForMultiarch> which tries to lay out the problem space multiarch is designed to address. As to your specific questions, answers are inline below: > 1) If I'm an Ubuntu end user who likes to watch youtube videos, what > does multiarch mean to me and what advantages will I notice? The end user is not likely to directly notice any advantages with respect to youtube videos - or at least, not ones that are obviously attributable to multiarch. What multiarch does is let us make the ia32-libs compat package obsolete, rendering an entire class of bugs irrelevant: because the 32-bit libraries are now delivered to the amd64 user the same way as they are to the i386 user, we will no longer have bugs (including security bugs) remaining unfixed in an unwieldly all-or-nothing compatibility package, nor will we have bugs *caused* by stale copies of libraries in ia32-libs. (Ask any of the X guys how much fun it is to try tracking down the out-of-date copy of mesa in ia32-libs that mysteriously causes amd64 desktops to hang.) Beyond the removal of ia32-libs, which is still in progress, multiarch will also allow us to make many *more* 32-bit libraries available on the 64-bit desktop, instead of a hand-picked few libraries used by certain common applications. As a result, 32-bit software will in the long run be more usable on 64-bit systems, because we have a solution that scales (instead of ia32-libs which doesn't); and because of this improved compatibility, more users will be able to take fuller advantage of their 64-bit systems by running the amd64 architecture without fear that their 32-bit programs won't work. And the libraries that are converted for multiarch will work better than they did in ia32-libs. Longstanding (recurring) bugs related to search paths for gtk themes and other plugins are resolved by switching to multiarch. > 2) As I understand Multiarch is a way to run i386 binaries on an > amd64 system. [2] What are the typical i386 binaries you want to run > on amd64? The typical ones for which we have multiarch library support in oneiric are skype and flash. There are three other 32bit-only closed-source packages in the Canonical partner archive that are not yet installable via multiarch: acroread, adobeair, and adobereader-deu. Wine, Google Earth, and ICA Client are other common 32-bit-only packages. There's plenty of other closed-source software for Linux that's also affected. > 3) If I'm a packager of a random library, does multiarch affect my > packaging? Is there anything I should be aware of or should it "just > work"? (What if I use debhelper 7, or cdbs, etc?) http://wiki.debian.org/Multiarch/Implementation Hope that helps, -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org [1] http://people.debian.org/~vorlon/multiarch-six-years-on.pdf
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