[RFC] what to name linux 32-bit compat

[Brooks Davis]

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

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