[Multiarch-devel] Re: multiarch status update

[Olaf van der Spek]

On 5/10/06, Matt Taggart and others <taggart at debian.org> wrote:
> For a couple years now a few of us have been talking about an idea called
> "multiarch". This is a way to seamlessly allow support for multiple different
> binary targets on the same system, for example running both i386-linux-gnu and
> amd64-linux-gnu binaries on the same system (many other working combinations
> exist as well). I have created a new page in the wiki to track info and status

Does it also allow completely arbitrary combinations to be installed?

> * allow for seamless large ABI transitions
> * allow users to smoothly migrate from one arch to another
> * do things like "partial architectures" so that we can add weird
>  processor variants without needing to add an entire new port to the
>  pool/mirrors
> * better assimilate the *BSD kernels and userspaces
> * better support non-monopoly archs, since they may be able to run bits
>  for other archs
> * maybe even to do stuff like use non-native archs (with support for
>  other binary targets) to build native bits (m68k emulator on
>  superfast amd64?).
> * other cool stuff

Does it also allow multiple versions of the same package to be
installed at the same time?
For example, multiple minor versions or multiple major versions?