[RFC] what to name linux 32-bit compat

[Scott Long]

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.

Scott