Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 14, 2012 19:06 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: Quotes of the week by jschrod
Parent article: Quotes of the week

keep in mind that multi-arch is not perfect.

I've run into problems with some libraries that don't work properly with multiarch (specifically installing the 32 bit aspell library removed the default library on ubuntu 11.04, causing the entire KDE desktop environment to be removed, not fun. Yes I did submit a ticket, no action in two months.)

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 15, 2012 19:45 UTC (Fri) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (1 responses)

That sounds like exactly the kind of problem that convinced Guillem Jover to block Ubuntu's version of multiarch and not accept it into Debian until all the kinks were worked out. Maybe he was onto something.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 15, 2012 19:53 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

the problem isn't in the mechanism, it's in how far it's been implemented.

apparently libaspell isn't multiarch (or at least it's not being installed appropriately if it is), so when you install the 32 bit version it uninstalls the 64 bit version that was already there.

blocking multiarch doesn't solve this problem, the same problem existed before multiarch, it's just that everyone knew not to try to do that (you only used 'special' 'prepared' libraries that were part of the ia32 package)

multiarch reduces the problem, but by making it work more of the time, you do run into the cases where it doesn't work.

If you try to block it until it's perfect, you will block it forever, because whenever you actually use something new, you find the corner cases.

multiarch works perfectly if you stick to doing only the things that you could do without it.