On Thu, Mar 14, 2002 at 01:06:54PM -0500, Aaron Haviland wrote:
it's not dpkg that has the problem. debian's gcc is patched so it defaults to i386 if the arch is any ix86, unless specified otherwise. (at least, that's what i'm making of this patch...)
Actually, that's standard gcc behavior, which redhat has as well. The difference here is that (if I understand things correctly) if you want to compile a package for iX86 where X != 3, then you have to download and install a package which *changes the default for every compile on the whole system*. As Charles mentioned, the way that RPM does it is by macros. You tell RPM "I want to build this particular packate for i586". It then goes off, and via the correct configure macros, adds the flags to gcc (probably the same flags that the debian package makes the system wide default) to compile *only* that package for i586. So if I'm a random user who wants to compile a package on a i686 platform to be run on a 386, and the sysadmin has installed the i686 package, that means that I have to do *extra* work to get *standard* behavior! Someone please tell me if I'm wrong, because that seems like a pretty hackish way to do things. -- Frank Sweetser fs at wpi.edu, fs at suave.net | $ x 18 Full-time WPI Network Tech, Part time Linux/Perl guy | The UNIX system has a command, nice, which allows a user to voluntarily reduce the priority of his process, in order to be nice to the other users. Nobody ever uses it. -A. Tanenbaum, _Modern Operating Systems_