I seem to recall Mark Shuttlework saying in an interview (possibly for Linux Format, possibly somewhere else) that he wanted to work with Debian to get fixed release cycles to help the Debian->Ubuntu porting efforts – It looks like he succeeded in planting the idea! I am looking forward to predictable Debian releases.
The most exciting thing I know of being attempted in the next Debian release (Squeeze) is the multiarch support, which should make running 32 bit apps on a 64 bit OS much better (currently some apps can install if you install the ia32-libs package however others need to be installed in a 32 bit chroot because they have too difficult dependencies to resolve). Redhat adopted another approach where 32 bit is more of a default than 64 bit than on Debian (On Debian a 64 bit install has absolutely no 32 bit support other than the ia32-libs package). Most 32 bit stuff seems to work ok on a 64 bit Redhat box but I don’t know how their approach relates to multiarch. The idea with multiarch is to natively support both 32 and 64 bit packages on the same system (I believe by changing the installer to put 32 bit libs in /lib32/, whereas I believe redhat uses /lib64/ for the 64 bit stuff and /lib/ is still 32 bit only).
I am very interested to see how this pans out as I run a 64 bit desktop at work with lots of 32 bit apps (and gave up on my 64 bit install at home because it was too fiddly for the 32 bit proprietary apps I want to use)
A copy of the Debian announcement is below:
Recent Comments