* Stephen Stafford ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) [030620 15:35]: > Judging from my random contacts with users, it's a fairly usual setup to see > a network of higher (500Mhz+) end hardware machines which sit on a LAN in > 1918space and are masqueraded to the outside internet by a firewall/gateway > running Debian on a 486 or low end pentium. I believe this to be a fairly > significant proportion of our userbase and I'd oppose any move to > marginalise them like this.
Well, the key problem is: debian doesn't properly support the way i386+ is constructed. That does also make problems for amd64. It would be really nice to be able to just put (additional) i686- (or 64bit-)optimized binaries in place where they are usefull, but only there and without doubling every binary. An possible way is: split i386 into subarchitectures i386-[subtype] and a plain i386, where subtype is one of i486, i586, i686, .... For every subtype there is a list what subtypes are acceptable in addition to plain i386 to install (so a i386-i686 would also install i386-i486 and i386-i586 packages). At creating the debian packages, normally (also with Architecture: any) only the plain i386 packages are created. If it is usefull to generate also packages for one or more subtypes they must be specified explizitly at the Architecture line. This way would also have the advantage that the existing mmx, 3dnow, ... packages (that are really just making the package list larger without adding content) can be removed. Cheers, Andi -- http://home.arcor.de/andreas-barth/ PGP 1024/89FB5CE5 DC F1 85 6D A6 45 9C 0F 3B BE F1 D0 C5 D1 D9 0C
