[RFC] what to name linux 32-bit compat

[Scott Long]

Brooks Davis wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 17, 2005 at 08:05:37PM -0700, Scott Long wrote:
> 
>>John Baldwin wrote:
>>
>>
>>>On Monday 17 January 2005 03:38 pm, David O'Brien wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>[ Respect the Reply-to:! ]
>>>>
>>>>/usr/ports Linux 32-bit compatibility on AMD64 is a mess and too rough
>>>>for what is expected of FreeBSD.  Anyway...
>>>>
>>>>We need to decide how to have both Linux i686 and Linux amd64 compat
>>>>support live side-by-side.  At the moment my leanings are for
>>>>/compat/linux32 and /compat/linux.  We could also go with /compat/linux
>>>>and /compat/linux64 <- taking a page from the Linux LSB naming convention
>>>>(ie, they have lib and lib64).
>>>>
>>>>Linux 32-bit support is most interesting -- that is how we get Acrobat
>>>>reader and some other binary-only ports.  The only Linux 64-bit things we
>>>>might want to run that truly matter 32-bit vs. 64-bit is Oracle and
>>>>IBM-DB2.  For other applications 32-bit vs. 64-bit is mostly a "Just
>>>>Because Its There(tm)" thing.  So making Linux 32-bit support the
>>>>cleanest looking from a /usr/ports POV has some merit.
>>>>
>>>>What do others think?
>>>
>>>
>>>Personally, I think /compat/linux32 and /compat/linux (for linux64) would 
>>>be the best way to go.  The idea being that /compat/linux runs native 
>>>binaries on any given arch, and if there's more than one arch supported, 
>>>the non-native ones get the funky names.  I don't think it will really 
>>>matter all to the end user much as acroread goes in /usr/local/bin and is 
>>>in the path and that's all the user has to worry about.  The ports stuff 
>>>to put linux32 in /compat/linux32 on amd64 is going to be stuff the user 
>>>doesn't have to worry or care about, so I don't think there's any 
>>>user-visible benefit to linux and linux64 versus linux32 and linux.
>>>
>>
>>Having different naming schemes for identical bits is risks confusion
>>and inconsistency for both ports mainainers and ports users.  I agree
>>that your scheme is attractive, but I think that consistency is more
>>important.  Also, I'd say that we should probably think about leaning in
>>the direction of the LSB for linux compat.  So my vote is that on all
>>platforms, /compat/linux is for 32-bit and /compat/linux64 is for
>>64-bit.
> 
> 
> I think this is a stretch.  By this argument we should really be using
> /compat/linux-i386 and /compat/linux-amd64 (or would that be x86-64
> since that's that linux calls it).  I suspect that if Intel doesn't kill
> ia64 entirely, we will be looking at machines where linux64 is
> potentially ambiguous in the not too distant a future.
> 
> -- Brooks
> 

Linux/ia64 is sufficiently irrelevant at this point.  It might survive
in niche areas, but it should be the exception and not part of the rule.

Scott