Re: Building gcc on Ubuntu 11.10

[Russ Allbery <rra at stanford dot edu>]

Toon Moene <toon@moene.org> writes:

> Thanks for the explanation.  Is there a rationale document (and a design
> document that explains what we have to expect from this change)
> somewhere on the Debian web site ?

> I couldn't find it, but perhaps I didn't search it right.

The documentation that I'm aware of is at:

    http://wiki.debian.org/Multiarch

The first link there is a more comprehensive statement on the discussion
that we just had.

> If this is such an obvious solution to the problems you mention, one
> would assume that other distributors would clamor for it, too.

Well, the approach that Debian (and Ubuntu) chose is a significant amount
of very disruptive work (as you're all noticing!).  It's considerably more
disruptive in some ways than the lib32/lib64 solution, particularly if one
takes into account the other things that weren't discussed in this thread,
such as overlap in package contents between packages for two different
architectures.

These sorts of designs are always tradeoffs between the level of
disruption and the level of long-term benefit, and I can certainly
understand other people making different decisions.  Debian and Ubuntu are
pursuing a direction that we think is more comprehensive and will provide
a lot of long-term benefit, but I think it's fair to say that the jury is
still out on whether that was the right tradeoff to take.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>