Re: FatELF patches...

[Matt Thrailkill <matt.thrailkill@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 6:54 AM,  <Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu> wrote:
> On Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:14:15 EST, "Ryan C. Gordon" said:
>
>> I probably wasn't clear when I said "distribution-wide policy" followed by
>> a "then again." I meant there would be backlash if the distribution glued
>> the whole system together, instead of just binaries that made sense to do
>> it to.
>
> OK.. I'll bite - which binaries does it make sense to do so?  Remember in
> your answer to address the very valid point that any binaries you *don't*
> do this for will still need equivalent hand-holding by the package manager.
> So if you're not doing all of them, you need to address the additional
> maintenance overhead of "which way is this package supposed to be built?"
> and all the derivative headaches.
>
> It might be instructive to not do a merge of *everything* in Ubuntu as you
> did, but only select a random 20% or so of the packages and convert them
> to FatELF, and see what breaks. (If our experience with 'make randconfig'
> in the kernel is any indication, you'll hit a *lot* of corner cases and
> pre-reqs you didn't know about...)

I think he is thinking of only having FatELF binaries for binaries and
libraries
that overlap between 32- and 64-bit in a distro install.  Perhaps everything
that is sitting in /lib32 for example could instead be in a FatELF
binaries in /lib,
alongside the 64-bit binary.

A thought I had, that I don't think has come up in this thread:
could it be practical or worthwhile for distros to use FatElf to ship multiple
executables with different compiler optimizations?  i586, i686, etc.