x86_64 as Fedora's primary platform

[Manuel Wolfshant]

On 09/28/2010 03:58 PM, mike cloaked wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 1:29 PM, Andrew Haley <aph at redhat.com> wrote:
>   
>> On 09/28/2010 12:06 PM, mike cloaked wrote:
>>     
>>> On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 9:37 AM, Andrew Haley <aph at redhat.com> wrote:
>>>       
>>>> On 09/27/2010 10:03 PM, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
>>>>         
>>>>> If anything I would expect the 32bit Desktop Live torrent download
>>>>> activity to be lower because of the promotion of the direct download
>>>>> link of that particular iso.  The splits in 32bit and 64bit download
>>>>> activity in the torrent server is very suggestive of a continued
>>>>> preference for 32bit installs regardless of what we promote.
>>>>>           
>>>> Sure, but the question is how much of that is simply due to a lack of
>>>> awareness.  To a first order approximation, if you have 64-bit
>>>> hardware, then a 64-bit spin is better.  We know that, but how many of
>>>> our users do?  The strong suggestion we make is that 32-bit is the
>>>> default, and in the absence of any other information I'll always go
>>>> for the default.  As will most people...
>>>>         
>>> May I chip in another thought here?  Although in principle it is
>>> better if 64 bit versions are used on capable hardware there still
>>> remains a series of issues with some code - eg firefox and thunderbird
>>> are not always built for 64 bit
>>>       
>> Huh?  Sure they are.
>>     
>
> Some people use nightlies for example -
> http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/nightly/latest-comm-1.9.2/
> Here there are no 64 bit versions that I am aware of?
>
> I do this when the stock version is somewhat behind even the stable
> release from mozilla.  eg in f12 the current thunderbird is 3.1.4 but
> the current f12 version is 3.0.7, and similar for firefox. Yet this is
> still a supported release - yes f13 is up to current stable releases
> from mozilla for both of these. However in the mozilla filestore for
> latest stable for thunderbird at:
>
> http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/3.1.4/linux-i686/en-GB/
>
> there is no 64 bit version, so if running 64 bit f12 then it would be
> necessary to install the 32 bit thunderbird and make sure that
> necessary 32 bit libraries were also installed to make it run?
>
>   
Maybe there's something that I miss here, but the fact that the mozilla 
devs do not find necessary (or maybe they do not have the computing 
power...) to build 64bit binaries each day ( but mind that they DO build 
the 4 beta series for x86_64 ! ) has nothing to do with fedora's policy 
about 64bit apps, does it ?