Hi debian-devel, For a couple years now a few of us have been talking about an idea called "multiarch". This is a way to seamlessly allow support for multiple different binary targets on the same system, for example running both i386-linux-gnu and amd64-linux-gnu binaries on the same system (many other working combinations exist as well). I have created a new page in the wiki to track info and status
http://wiki.debian.org/multiarch Recently HP and Canonical Ltd. have been looking into possible implementation strategies and this has resulted in the following report http://multiarch.alioth.debian.org/multiarch-hp-report.pdf One of the things that came out of that report is that implementing multiarch would be much easier if we had a few enhancements in the package manager. This prompted Scott James Remnant to start working on a "dpkg 2.0" design document. That has been sent to the debian-dpkg list and is available at http://lists.debian.org/debian-dpkg/2006/05/msg00022.html (please direct any followup about dpkg there) Multiarch will allow Debian to * better support systems that can run multiple binary targets, like i386 on amd64, i386 on ia64. * better support MMX/SSE/Altivec/etc tuned packages * allow for seamless large ABI transitions * allow users to smoothly migrate from one arch to another * do things like "partial architectures" so that we can add weird processor variants without needing to add an entire new port to the pool/mirrors * better assimilate the *BSD kernels and userspaces * better support non-monopoly archs, since they may be able to run bits for other archs * maybe even to do stuff like use non-native archs (with support for other binary targets) to build native bits (m68k emulator on superfast amd64?). * other cool stuff We think multiarch can be implemented with minimal disruption to unstable, most changes won't effect "single-arch" type systems at all. We'd like to start working on implementing it, but before we do we wanted to get feedback, concerns, recommendations, volunteers :), etc. This is a big undertaking and we're going to need everyone's help to make it happen. Please reply. Thanks, -- Tollef Fog Heen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> dann frazier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Lamont Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Scott James Remnant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Matt Taggart <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Matt Zimmerman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
