64-bit or 32-bit?

Marco Matthies posted <442A6C24.2090801gmx.net>, excerpted below,  on
Wed, 29 Mar 2006 13:14:44 +0200:

> Bertrand Jacquin wrote:
>> The first exemple I wrote was in reality :
>> CFLAGS="-m32" emerge -avt
mozilla-firefox
>> 
>> To be clear : I don't want a chroot, because it
make be 2 gentoo to
>> maintain and a lot of things unecessary ATM.
>> I would like portage build for me a software in 32
bit mode.
>> If it's a lib, I would like portage to install it
in /emul/linux/x86
>> if I tell him to do that
> 
> Sorry, i missed the part about you not wanting a
chroot. As far as I 
> know, portage currently does not support installing
32-bit and 64-bit 
> versions of the same package, i.e. it does not know
anything about the 
> bitness a package was compiled for and therefore
doesn't use this 
> information for dependency resolution. In other words,
it will not know 
> that the X11 libs it installed are 64-bit and that the
firefox you want 
> to compile for 32-bits needs the 32-bit X11 libs.

That's correct.  You /will/ eventually trash your system
trying to do
this, as portage will get hopelessly confused trying to
merge stuff with
dependencies it /thinks/ you have already merged, only you
don't, because
you merged them in the other bitness.

The easiest way to keep portage from getting confused is to
run two
separate instances of it that don't know about each other. 
The way you do
that is to run a 32-bit chroot.  Yes, it /does/ require a
certain amount
of duplication, but if you use a stage-3 x86 install and the
binary
packages CD, it's not /too/ bad.  You lose a bit of
customization going
pre-built binaries, but it's a trade-off between that and
the time to
compile all that stuff twice.  You can always remerge the
specific
packages you want to.

At some point in the future, likely with the ongoing full
rewrite
project rewrite that's very possibly a year or two away
from release,
altho the feature may well be backported some time before
then, it's
planned that portage will have a multi-bitness deps tracker
and resolver. 
However, that's a /long/ way off.  Meanwhile, you can
either go 32-bit
only, 64-bit only, or run a multilib system.  If you run a
multilib
system, you can choose limited 32-bit support based on the
32-bit binary
compatibility libs, or full 32-bit support based on a
chroot, with all the
time necessary to maintain it balanced against the better
32-bit support.

Personally, I don't like closed source slaveryware in any
case, and
basically won't have it on my machine.  If I was content
being someone's
slave because they don't respect me as a user enough to
give me my rights,
I could have stayed on MSWormOS.  After all, I left a decade
of knowledge
behind when I switched, and I /could/ have just stayed where
I was.  I
found it worth my time to switch, and there's no way I'm
going to consent
or allow myself to be tied down to unfreedomware now, or why
did I switch
in the first place?  That makes the 32-bit/64-bit software
issue much
easier, since the non-marginal freedomware was ported a long
time ago and
has been available in 64-bit native for soome time.  It's
only the
marginal stuff, and closed source slaveryware that I
couldn't/wouldn't run
anyway, that's 32-bit only, now.

Of course, I'm mature enough to realize not everyone holds
my values,
neither do I expect them to, so I recognize that those that
choose to run
what I consider slaveryware can make that choice, just as I
made mine. 
Just don't ask me to take part in it.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." 
Richard Stallman in
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux
/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html


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