Resurrect discussion: Mixing 32 and 64 bit distro

[Charles Wilson]

On 2/15/2013 5:22 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> So we have five voices for keeping 64 and 32 bit separate, one for
> mixing, one undecided but now leaning towards keeping it separate.  I
> also asked two people off-list, and both of them thought it a good idea
> to keep the distros separate.
>
> I'm inclined to revert or tweak a couple of my patches which were meant
> to mix the distros.  My implied question to you for each of these points
> is, shall I do that or not?

I realize I'm chiming in late here, but I'm going to shock everybody and 
actually *agree* with Yaakov.  Add another vote for keeping 64 and 32 
completely separate -- I believe its actually LESS of a long-term 
maintenance nightmare, because it avoids:

a) yet more upstream churn in major packages (Qt, GTK, etc...) that use 
dlopen() heavily.  Even if we modify dlopen to "quick, #if 64bit then 
check s/lib/cyg64/ first, then s/lib/cyg/, then lib- prefix...; else 
just check s/lib/cyg, then lib- prefix;" it's still going to be painful.

b) All the shim code, whether in the cygwin runtime DLL, or a shim exe, 
or a shim "fake" cygwin1.dll, is a fun place for more bugs to hide.

c) All those build systems out there, including cmake (and anyone who 
uses it), plain-old-makefiles (zlib, libpng), libtool, scons, etc, will 
all need to be 'taught' about the cyg64 prefix.

vs.

"I can't run stuff from /cygdrive/c/cygwin32/bin when I'm in a cygwin64 
shell"

Don't Do That. WJM.

and

"I ran setup64.exe to upgrade my existing (32bit) cygwin installation 
and now it's all broken."

Don't Do That. WJM.

--
Chuck