Backward Compatibility

[Gene Czarcinski]

On Friday 27 February 2004 11:05, Guillaume Chazarain wrote:
> As I understand it the lib64/ thing is for old 32 bit
> binary apps to run flawlessly side by side with x86_64
> apps.  Does Fedora Core intent to provide 32 bit libs
> for each package ? I understand it raises some packaging
> problems but otherwise it defeats the compatibility
> advantage.
>
> OTOH, if we assume there are really few 32 bit apps that
> will survive in an 64 bit installation, then why not
> keeping lib/ for 64 bit libs and installing 32 bit stuff
> in /usr/i386-pc-linux-gnu/{bin,lib,...} ?
>
> I may have missed something since I don't currently own
> an amd64, just anticipating.

Agreed to standards say that /lib64 and /usr/lib64 are for 64 bit 
applications.  This applies to other architectures such as the sparc64 as 
well as the x86_64.

There is a small number of applications that will be 32 bit only for right now 
(openoffice.org).  There are some packages such as glibc which are both 64 
bit and 32 bit.  There is a basic development environment which will support 
compiling 32 bit applications under the 64 bit OS and not a lot of them.  The 
problem is that installing them post system installations is more than a bit 
tricky since a lot of "library" packages include files in /usr/bin, etc. and 
those directory trees contain both 32 bit and 64 bit applications.

Gene