Previously Stephen Frost wrote: > Oh, really? That's why the kernel says i686 and gcc says i486?
Admittedly i?86 is crap in that respect but they're basically variants of the same thing. > Right, bringing in politics is useless and counter-productive, so why > are you? Choosing amd64 isn't political, it's the argument about what > to call it and why is political. I agree that we should just pick a > name that will not confuse people- that's not x86-64/x86_64 which *will* > be confusing to people as to which it is or will cause problems with our > various tools. Lets look at other big distributions: Redhat: x86-64 (or 'Intel EM64T & AMD64' in their whitepapers) SuSE: x86_64 (or 'AMD/Intel 64-bit processors') Gentoo: amd64 Mandrake: AMD64 So the two biggest ones picked x86-64 (ignoring the - vs _). Slackware and Conectiva do not support the architecture at the moment. Which means that the vast majority of Linux users will know and recognize x64-64. Now lets look at what developers will encounter: kernel x86_64 gcc x86_64 binutils x86_64 So all developers chose x86_64. Looking at that data it seems obvious that the Linux/free software community has made its choice and overwhelmingly selected x86[_-]64. So why does Debian want to different and pick a name that no developer uses and users will not recognize from popular other distributions? Wichert. -- Wichert Akkerman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> It is simple to make things. http://www.wiggy.net/ It is hard to make things simple.
