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
