x86-64 on i386 (was Re: Promoting i386 version over x86_64?)

[Matthew Garrett]

On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 06:29:17PM +0000, Paul Jakma wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Dec 2009, Matthew Garrett wrote:
>
>> "It works for me" is a poor standard of support.
>
> There must be something transmogrifying my emails before it reaches  
> other subscribers of this list, either that or I am being unreasonable in 
> thinking that by asking /if/ Fedora would consider *supporting* this 
> configuration (i.e. in the future) that it would be clear that:
> - I am not complaining about software not working quite right now

The problem here is that you appear to be massively underestimating the 
amount of work that would be required to actually support this 
configuration. We'd need to audit every ioctl entry point, every file in 
proc and every sysfs attribute. We'd need to port every application that 
uses vm86 over to using x86emu. We'd need to add, test and support a 
32-to-64 bit cross building toolchain. yum would need some amount of 
work that Seth has implied is significant. That's a lot of work for 
marginal benefits, and nobody seems interested in stepping up to do that 
work.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org