* Steinar H. Gunderson (sgunderson@bigfoot.com) wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 12, 2006 at 10:44:01PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> > (Personally, if I'd designed it, the libraries would actually live in
> > /usr/lib32 and /usr/lib64, and /usr/lib would be a symlink to whichever
> > you needed it to be at the moment. Likewise for /usr/bin.)
>
> Actually, there have been plans for doing something like this in Debian for a
> while: Let stuff live in /lib/i686-linux-gnu and /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
> (lib32 and lib64 doesn't really scale, once you start considering stuff like
> "ia64 can emulate hppa"), and adjust paths and symlinks as fit. It's still a
> long way to go, though.
The general feeling is that there won't be support for multiple versions
of a given binary being installed at once though. The proposal Steinar
mentioned is called 'multiarch' and is being discussed with LSB and
other distros too, though I think it did mostly originated with Debian
folks.
Just my 2c.
Thanks,
Stephen