Spilt libperl from perl

[Jeremy Katz]

On Mon, 2007-04-23 at 22:21 +0200, Hans de Goede wrote:
> Bill Nottingham wrote:
> > 2) Development - developing i386 apps on a x86_64 box. Or ppc64 apps anywhere.
> > 
> > #2 has historically been a problem that multlib solved. In a fully open
> > Fedora world, it can be solved with mock (assuming we throw up a full
> > ppc64 tree somewhere).
> > 
> Actually 2 is a problem that multilib doesn't solve, I've written some scripts 
> / hacks to be able to build i386 on x86_64 without using mock because I have a 
> slow link and thus mock used to take eons, now it only takes ages (--autocache 
> rules!). However these scripts were a big hack, and even with this big hack 
> things didn't always work properly. Using mock is the only sane way to build 
> i386 packages on an x86_64 install.

That's only true if the world revolves around developing packages.  If
I'm a software developer writing and testing software, it works quite
nicely.  I have a checkout of anaconda, I run make and it builds for
x86_64.  If I have a need to test something or see something on i386, I
just have to ensure that -m32 is in my CFLAGS/LDFLAGS and can use the
same environment.  And then copy over the shared object into where I'm
testing or whatever happens to be needed for that case.

And the above holds true for a *LOT* of software.  If I'm using
something with pkg-config, I have to also set its appropriate
environment variable.  And similarly pass the right args to configure
for autofoolery.  

Building packages is an entirely different ball of wax.  And part of the
problem there is more bugs in the implementation with RPM than anything
else.[1]

Jeremy

[1] And some of the changes in jbj's rpm 4.4.8 actually help in this
area, but I'm not sure that they solve everything