comps discussion at fudcon and the future

[Matthew Woehlke]

Florian Festi wrote:
> Multilib:
> The situation has changed a lot since we introduced multilib. The challenge
> who is going to support 64bit processors first has been decided long ago 
> and the age of 32bit processors is ending.

No it isn't. I doubt very much that use of 32-bit processors is going 
away any time soon. (In "traditional desktops", maybe, but not embedded 
devices. Perhaps even in devices Fedora is interested in supporting, but 
that I'm not so sure about. It will depend heavily on a: if netbooks 
universally switch to 64-bit CPU's, and b: if Fedora decides to support 
other sorts of MID's, e.g. "phones". Yes, I know, at the point Fedora is 
running on such a device it will be "an MID that happens to be able to 
make phone calls", but we're already at that stage.)

And I hear plenty of embedded devices still use *16*-bit CPU's...

> There are several annoying features
> of the solution that was chosen at the time (overwriting 32 bit binaries,
> install lots of files twice) and we should get rid of them at some point in
> the (not too near) future. But this may require some other changes first...

Other than perhaps binutils, why would you ever have a 32-bit binary on 
a 64-bit system? ;-) Or do you include libs in "binaries"?

As for the rest, IMO as long as gcc supports -m32, it should stay. The 
project I work on for my day job would have to completely scrap our 
build system and break what is currently a one-package multilib 
distribution into two separate platforms, if multilib went away.

-- 
Matthew
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