On Sun, Nov 21, 1999 at 12:41:42AM +0100, Marcus Brinkmann wrote: > Please note that Debians architecture and ftp set up make it difficult at > least to say: > > This package is for all linux systems. > > This package is for all linux systems, but needs to be recompiled on each. > > This package is for all linux+bsd systems. > > This package is for all linux+bsd systems, but needs to be recompiled on > each.
(1) FreeBSD's support for running linux binaries needs to be enhanced. If done, that reduces the scope of the problem. If not done the problem is rather nasty. [I understand that dpkg and bash have problems running under this emulation.] As I understand it, what's missing is support for a few currently unimplemented syscall. If not done, a lot more work is going to have to go into working around this situation. (2) Once that emulation is reasonably complete -- such that any remaining problems are obviously kernel related -- the simple thing to do is make the freebsd kernel depend on (or recommend, for optional/extra/non-us packages) any relevant freebsd specific packages. Hopefully, there won't be too many unessential packages pulled in using such a scheme. > Until this is fixed, either by a scheme like "Architecture: linux-all" > or "Architecture: bsd-any", or a more generic scheme like replacing > Architecture specification by virtual and concrete dependencies > (virtual like linux-syscalls and concrete like libc6), we only can > want this goal and not implement it. It's true that brute force workarounds should be replaced with something more elegant. And I hope that the hurd and freebsd people can come up with such a thing. -- Raul
