On Tue, 2014-08-12 at 17:01 -0700, John Stultz wrote:
[...]
> The downsides here are many. The distros will probably hate this idea,

I certainly hate the idea of adding another 32-bit port to Debian.
I think that it's OK for traditional distros to say 'just upgrade to
64bit' while you solve the problem for 32-bit embedded systems where
there's probably little demand for supporting multiple ABIs at once.

>  as it requires rebuilding the world, and maintaining another legacy
> architecture support. I’m also not completely sure how robust
> multi-arch packaging is in the face of having to handle 3-4
> architectures on one system.

dpkg multiarch covers this just fine, while I believe RPM is limited to
biarch.

> On the kernel side, it also adds more complexity, where we have to add
> even more complex compat support for 64bit systems to handle all the
> various 32bit applications possible.
[...]

Didn't we need to do this already to support x32?  Have compat ioctls
involving time been botched?

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings
Humans are not rational beings; they are rationalising beings.