Improving the way we select multilib packages for trees

[Peter Jones]

On Mon, 2006-05-01 at 11:24 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Jeremy Katz <katzj at redhat.com> writes:
> > On Sat, 2006-04-29 at 11:10 +0100, Joe Orton wrote:
> >> Nobody has come up with a feasible plan for dealing with 
> >> %{_bindir}/foo-config scripts AFAIK.
> 
> > Probably the best thing to do in these cases is to create pkgconfig .pc
> > files and then make the foo-config script a simple wrapper around
> > pkgconfig.
> 
> How will that fix the problem that you need to return different results
> depending on whether the user is interested in the 32-bit or 64-bit
> libraries?  Right now the script would require psychic abilities to
> figure that out, because the user has no way to indicate it.
> 
> If we bit the bullet and had separate /usr/bin/ and /usr/bin64/
> directories, then it'd be trivial: store the appropriate config program
> in each of those directories, and the user uses $PATH or an explicit
> path to indicate which one he wants.

That doesn't work well either, though.  Most of the time, pkg-config
isn't being run by a user, it's being run by configure or make, or one
of them via rpm .  You don't want to have to change the paths everywhere
to build for the other arch, you want to do:

rpm -ba --target=i386 foo.spec

and just have it work.
-- 
  Peter