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Debian Wheezy To Have Multi-Architecture Support
dkd903 writes "Debian has announced they are introducing support for multiarch in Debian Wheezy. Multiarch support means a Debian system will be able to install and run applications built for a different target system."
Read about it here: http://wiki.debian.org/Multiarch
So they are doing it in a stupid way to be different?
No, they're doing it a different way to solve a broader set of problems, as their rationale says. Feel free to debate whether the problems they claim to be solving are worth solving, or whether their solution is the right one for those problems, but don't claim they're just being stupid until you've read the rationale. (I don't have a dog in this fight; the OS I use and develop for/on uses fat binaries for the multi-architecture part of that. I'm just noting that there's a rationale to read before concluding that they're just being different to be different.)
No. Your reaction illustrates that you don't understand what you are talking about.
LSB says that /lib64 is where x86_64 libraries go on x86_32 machines, but says nothing about any other machine architectures and/or combinations. The problem itself is not x86/x86_64-specific, however, so the LSB-specified solution is incomplete.
The LSB is wrong. Debian is solving the problem correctly.
The fact that "something has worked just fine for Red Hat for years now" only reflects the fact that Red Hat doesn't focus anywhere other than x86. For that and several other reasons, Red Hat is a toy operating system as far as I'm concerned.
b.g.
The summary is terrible. And not just the invalid link.
Here's a more informative link than the one posted by lnunes.
Multiarch is not gonna let you run ARM binaries on an Intel chip or anything like that - nor will it let you run Windows code on Debian. What it will do, however, is let you run x86 compiled binaries on an x64 system. It will also allow for things like mixing armhf and armel code on modern ARM, but for the most part, running 32-bit x86 code on 64-bit x64 (amd64) systems will be the benefit most of us will get.
How will we benefit? You'll be able to run binary-only x86 code on your x64 system. This means Adobe Flash and Skype. Any open source code is fine, because it can be compiled for your own architecture - but for binary-only proprietary software, it may not be available for your architecture.
"But this is already possible" you may be thinking. It is, but it's a nasty kludge at the moment. These packages, when installed on 64-bit systems, depend on 32-bit versions of several system libraries, which are separate packages. There's a series of kludges to make them work, and it's not very flexible.
The heart of multiarch support is a re-designed file system layout which accounts for the architecture of any binaries. So instead of putting some binary libraries in /lib/, it puts it in /lib/amd64/ or /lib/i386/. This is the first step for allowing the same package to be installed for different architectures. Then, dpkg will have to be modified to track packages from more than one architecture on the one system.