Re: /lib64/ for mixed architectures

[Ralf Corsepius]

Am Fre, 2003-06-20 um 03.33 schrieb Bart Trojanowski:
> Hello,
> 
>   I am participating in the debian amd64 port.  amd64 is a mixed 32 and
> 64bit architecture and requires special attention when it comes time to
> installing libraries on the system.
> 
>   By studying the LSB and what other distributions have done we have
> decided to install 32bit libraries in /lib, and 64bit versions of the
> same libraries in /lib64.

I've never understood this kind of decision. IMHO, using multilibs would
have been a superior choice, but ...

>   At this time, if I understand things correctly, the GNU autotools have
> no notion of /lib64.
> 
>   Instead of modifying every package to manually force
> libdir=${prefix}/lib64 we would like the GNU autotools (either by
> default or only on a debian distribution) to recognize mixed
> architectures and install 32bit libs in /lib and 64bit libs in /lib64.
> 
>   Has this problem ever been considered?
I don't think autoconf is the place to implement such kind of things,
because autoconf is not a packaging tool and has no notion on any
system's characteristics.

All that autoconf does is to provide some "arbitrary defaults" which fit
for "many cases" and won't do harm in "most cases". 
In case your system has special demands, you, rsp. the packaging tool
(rpm, dkg, etc.) to be used have to provide these values.

Ralf