On Wed, Apr 04, 2012 at 09:18:59AM +1200, Michael Hope wrote:
The subdirectories could be called fred and jim and it would still work. The only thing required is that this part of the naming scheme be agreed amongst the distros.
This looks to me like it's turning into a bike-shed painting excerise between the distros out there. That's really sad.
I don't think we ever even had the discussion: Debian invented their Debian-internal scheme for managing multiple ABIs. They have in the past used patched versions of gcc, as in the case of x86_64.
(cc'ed cross-distro as the discussion is also going on there[1]. This patch continues that)
I like the idea of incompatible binaries having different loaders. The path doesn't matter but the concept does. Like i686/x86_64, it gives distros the option to install different binaries alongside each other for compatibility, performance, or upgrade reasons. The compatibility cost is nice and low and lets Debian do some interesting cross development things.
Does the dynamic linker itself contain any routines that depend on the soft/hard ABI? That would quite surprise me, so I don't see the point of having different dynamic linkers for those ABIs. One dynamic linker should handle both just fine.
No one has released a hard float based distro yet. We have time to discuss and fix this so we don't get in the crazy situation where a third party binary only runs on some distros.
Isn't e.g. Fedora 17/armv7hl a hard float based distro?
Jakub