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

[Sven Luther]

On Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 11:37:33AM +0200, Andreas Jochens wrote:
> 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.

Euh, this seems to me to be somewhat strange, i have no trouble building 64bit
kernels, so i really doubt tihs is the reason. Is it possible that it was not
possible to build it prior to the biarch toolchain being available ?

> 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.

Oh well, if the package needs to run the binary in place for building, this is
i believe a breakage in such packages and needs to be fixed.

> 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.

Nonsense, the packages are just broken.

Friendly,

Sven Lutther