Base Directory Specification and plugins

[Simon McVittie]

On Tue, 23 Nov 2010 at 13:42:32 -0500, Ryan Lortie wrote:
> With only slight hesitation due to fears of political correctness, I'd
> suggest using Debian arch names here.  They tend to be an awful lot more
> sane for this purpose.

Speaking as a Debian Developer: they're much shorter, but you might notice
that Debian and Ubuntu aren't planning to use these strings for multiarch.
They're OK as CPU architecture names, but now that dpkg supports non-Linux
ports (kfreebsd-i386, kfreebsd-amd64, hurd-i386) they're really showing their
limitations, and people only define them for platforms that make sense as
targets for dpkg. By the time you include all the misc that defines an ABI
(like distinguishing between OABI and EABI on ARM Linux) you'd more or less end
up reinventing GNU triplets.

GNU triplets have the advantage that by the time you get a port to any platform
up and running, if you're using gcc (even as a cross-compiler), you've already
chosen a GNU triplet for that platform.

For Debian users, Debian arch names do map to GNU triplets rather easily, via
dpkg-architecture(1):

    % dpkg-architecture -aamd64 -qDEB_HOST_GNU_TYPE
    x86_64-linux-gnu
    % dpkg-architecture -amipsel -qDEB_HOST_GNU_TYPE
    dpkg-architecture: warning: Specified GNU system type mipsel-linux-gnu does not match gcc system type x86_64-linux-gnu.
    mipsel-linux-gnu
    % dpkg-architecture -ahurd-i386 -qDEB_HOST_GNU_TYPE
    dpkg-architecture: warning: Specified GNU system type i486-gnu does not match gcc system type x86_64-linux-gnu.
    i486-gnu

Regards,
    S