Duncan wrote:
As an aside, I'd often wondered at the implications of having a "multibin", similar to "multilib", and why, with all the work going into multilib, nobody seemed to be doing anything with multibin. I had wondered why having a 64-bit mplayer for most stuff, and a 32-bit mplayer, for 32-bit-only binary-only codecs, wasn't as reasonable a solution as it seemed to be for libraries. Your comments just touch on that, but it's the first time I've seen /any/ sort of comments on the subject, from anyone who'd be in a position to know the issues involved, from any of the distributions.
Well, the problem is, even if you have two different directories for each bitness, the binaries will still collide, because of $PATH: How do you decide whether you want the 32bit or 64bit player? There's no real solution other than having suffixes like e.g. mplayer32 and mplayer64. You could reset PATH each time you launch a binary of other bitness, but that's just an ugly workaround and it may not always do what you want. So you have to use suffixes. But then, you don't need two directories, as the binaries won't collide anymore... Additionally, what do you do about scripts? PATH doesn't work there, and so you'd have to first edit the #!-line before executing it.
On the other hand, multilib will never be a permanent solution, I see it as a nice way to keep compatibility with old stuff, but as soon as companies are starting to provide 64bit binaries, it will slowly disappear from amd64's sight.
So the final question is: Is it really worth the effort? Regards, -- Simon Stelling Gentoo/AMD64 Operational Co-Lead [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- [email protected] mailing list
