[RFC] what to name linux 32-bit compat

[John Baldwin]

On Monday 17 January 2005 10:24 pm, 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.

Actually, I think going the non-ambiguous route and using the fuller names 
like that (now that I see it) is probably the best bet when there is more 
than one possibility.

-- 
John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>  <><  http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve"  =  http://www.FreeBSD.org