Misguided
Misguided
Posted Jul 13, 2006 7:24 UTC (Thu) by evgeny (subscriber, #774)In reply to: Misguided by elanthis
Parent article: The end of the multiarch era?
> Imagine, for example, having a server which exports NFS-mounted file systems to thin clients.
I have this all the time; why does the server need to know anything about what it NFS-exports?!
> So all of your open source apps are now 64-bit clean, hmm?
Well, of course not right now; but that was the Jon's assertion that the amount of free software that doesn't compile on any reasonable arch should be decreasing with time (and it is; OO is one of the last dinosaurs). The very idea of multiarch is because there are CPUs supporting more than one target instructions; in turn, this happened mostly because of the vast amount of closed-source software which the chipmakers wanted to support.
> Just because Fedora sucks rocks at multi-arch doesn't mean that multi-arch is dead, is unfeasible, or not useful. Let some of the competing, much better thought out alternatives rise up.
Of course, Gentoo rules here (IMHO, it does also in any other comparison with FC).
Posted Jul 18, 2006 16:43 UTC (Tue)
by hazelsct (guest, #3659)
[Link] (1 responses)
> I have this all the time; why does the server need to know anything about what it NFS-exports?!
So that one can use a package manager on the PPC server to install the amd64 and ARM packages and serve them all up to the various clients properly. Imagine being able to "apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade" and have all three arches upgrade at once.
(Can't do it in a chroot because the binaries won't run -- not to mention the wasted space of the duplicated -common packages.)
Posted Jul 18, 2006 17:27 UTC (Tue)
by evgeny (subscriber, #774)
[Link]
There is no reason why a package manager shouldn't be able to deal with packages for another arch; this has nothing to do with the multiarch OS support. Did you mean perhaps the multiarch support for your favorite package manager?
> Imagine being able to "apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade" and have all three arches upgrade at once.
Heh, you've got quite a bit of imagination... Not to mention many technical details why it'd never work correctly (at least with the current apt), are you serious you want to have the _same_ OS on the server and clients?! And what about _several_ different thin client images? (In my case, a RH-7.3 box simultaneously serves releases of Slackware, Ubuntu, and Knoppix thin clients; users tend to be picky about their favorite distro...).
> (Can't do it in a chroot because the binaries won't run
There is no need to use chroot for that. Just give one NFS client (e.g. your own workstation) a temporary r/w acces and do all the upgrades from it.
> -- not to mention the wasted space of the duplicated -common packages.)
So now you're talking about NFS-exporting the root file system of the server?!
C'mon, NFS has a notorious track record of security holes (and is inherently insecure anyway). And, 90% of the client disk space would be due to the GUI apps which shouldn't be installed on the server.
> > Imagine, for example, having a server which exports NFS-mounted file systems to thin clients.Misguided - NOT!
> So that one can use a package manager on the PPC server to install the amd64 and ARM packages and serve them all up to the various clients properly.Misguided - NOT!