[RFC] what to name linux 32-bit compat

[John Baldwin]

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.

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