[Debian-ppc64-devel] Re: ppc64 archive bloating alioth disk ...

[Andreas Jochens]

On 05-Sep-23 10:38, Sven Luther wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 20, 2005 at 11:46:19PM +0200, Andreas Jochens wrote:
> > > Oh,  libz and libncurses too ? I thought only the base toolchain was biarch,
> > > see it has already started.
> > 
> > libz had a biarch infrastructure for i386/amd64 and I filed a patch
> > to the BTS which extended this to powerpc/ppc64. That patch was 
> > accepted.
> 
> I don't see any 64bit libraries in the libz or libncurses packages in sarge.

You are right, the 'lib64z1' biarch binary package is currently only 
available on sparc and s390. For powerpc the lib64z1 binary can apparently 
be built only on a 64-bit machine with a 64-bit kernel, but not
on an ordinary 32-bit powerpc machine. This seems to be the reason
why 'lib64z1' was not enabled on powerpc. This is a general problem
of the biarch approach - cross-compiling does not work generally.

The other direction, i.e. a 32-bit biarch lib32z1 on the native 64-bit 
port, is less difficult because all 64-bit ppc64 machines can also
run 32 bit binaries. That part of my patch got applied so that the 
ppc64 now has the lib32z1 biarch package.

The biarch approach generally requires that all biarch packages 
have to be built on 64-bit machines because the build process
is not clean with respect to cross-compilation for many packages.

Regards
Andreas Jochens