Rethinking Fedora multilib support

Posted Jan 16, 2017 9:26 UTC (Mon) by pabs (subscriber, #43278)
In reply to: Rethinking Fedora multilib support by aleXXX
Parent article: Rethinking Fedora multilib support

Cross-compiling and multi-arch $PATH are unrelated. Cross-compiling uses compiler executables for the build architecture that target the host architecture, not executables for the host architecture that target the host architecture. So you don't generally need any executables for the host architecture when cross-compiling.

Multi-arch $PATH doesn't have any significant use-cases yet that I know of.

Rethinking Fedora multilib support

Posted Jan 16, 2017 13:52 UTC (Mon) by lsl (subscriber, #86508) [Link] (1 responses)

> Multi-arch $PATH doesn't have any significant use-cases yet that I know of.

A network file system that is mounted by machines of different arch. Plan 9 did it that way many years ago. You had /mips/bin, /386/bin, …, as well as a directory for arch-less executables (shell scripts).

On startup, the setup scripts would bind the appropriate directories for the local machine so that their contents would be available at /bin. It used bind/union mounts instead of $PATH but you could do the same thing with $PATH on Unix.

Rethinking Fedora multilib support

Posted Jan 22, 2017 2:36 UTC (Sun) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

Ack, but what was the motivation for Plan 9 doing it like that? What can you achieve with multi-arch /usr/bin or $PATH that you can't do without it?