[Gllug] Debian 32/64 bitness

[Peter Grandi]

>>> On Sat, 15 Oct 2005 18:48:19 +0100, Nix "The crackpot"
>>> <nix at esperi.org.uk> said:

[ ... ]

>> The reason why multiplatform installs haven't been well
>> targeted is lazyness, induced by the x86 monoculture that has
>> infected so many environments,

nix> Yeah right. That explains perfectly well why Debian's
nix> having trouble, since with its 11 environments it's *such*
nix> a monoculture.

Well, ''monoculture'' here was clearly intended to mean that in
actual environments, as many/most installations almost only have
one type or achitecture, while in the past, e.g. in UNIXy
environments, where a mix of Sun, HP, IBM, ... hosts was quite
common, this was not so blatant.

I think that Debian has 11 distinct ''monocultures'', to the
point where the x86 and x64 ones coexist not that well.

And even considering the diversity of 11 monocultures, some are
rather more common in the environment than others; for example
those somewhat familiar with Debian are sometimes entertained or
horrified by watching the Debian Popularity contest statistics:

  http://PopCon.Debian.org/

   «The popularity contest project is an attempt to map the
    usage of Debian packages. This site publishes the statistics
    gathered from report sent by users of the popularity-contest
    package. This package sends every week the list of packages
    installed and the access time of relevant files to the server
    via email. Every day the server anonymizes the result and
    publishes this survey. For more information, read the README
    and the FAQ.»

where reordering the «Statistics per Debian architectures:»
table by count gives:

  arch		submissions
  ----		-----------
  i386              6611
  ''unknown''        476
  amd64              361
  powerpc            129
  sparc               88
  alpha               53
  hppa                46
  ia64                28
  armeb               16
  mips                10
  mipsel              10
  arm                  8
  s390                 4
  hurd-i386            3
  m68k                 3
  kfreebsd-i386        2
  ppc64                1

Now the Popularity Contest is not about a fully representative
sample, but the numbers are stark and sad.

As an aside, they however sort of confirm Linus' opinion in
this interview:

  http://WWW.Linux-Mag.com/2005-01/
    "The Emperor Penguin" Monday, 03 January 2005

that the architectures that really matter are x86/x64, PPC (and
PPC64, as that is what Linus's PC is :->) and ARM (ARM probably
is wildly undercounted in the above stats, as it is mostly used
in embedded stuff that is hard to imagine sending out PopCon
updates).

nix> It's not been fixed in package managers for much the same
nix> reason as the reason why cross-compilation support is so
nix> bad: firstly, it's a hard problem to solve correctly,

Well, it does not have to be solved _perfectly_, or even
''cleverly'' (e.g. the long awaited multiarch proposal), just
better, and other distributions have done so with other package
managers.

The alternative of course is hideous hacks like those I have
described are currently being practiced.

nix> and secondly most people don't need it.

To me that's another way to say that it is because of the pretty
obvious ''monoculture'' in many environments...

[ ... ]

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