Re: Linux/i386 compat on Freebsd/amd64 / ONLY_FOR_ARCHS

On Sun, Nov 07, 2004 at 03:18:47PM +0100, Benjamin Lutz wrote:

> Now, one thing I noticed is that pretty much all linux ports are marked 
> with ONLY_FOR_ARCHS=i386, when in fact they work just fine on 
> FreeBSD/amd64 (with the linux/i386 compatibility environment, ie 
> linux_base-8 installed). This is somewhat annoying,as it requires 
> manually setting MACHINE_ARCH=i386 and sometimes ARCH=i386 with every 
> make.
> 
> Now... I assume that eventually FreeBSD will also get Linux/*64 support 
> sooner or later, and that there'll be linux ports that use only one of 
> the two linux compat environments.
> 
> So what I'm trying to say is that I'm not sure that setting ONLY_FOR_ARCHS 
> for binary linux ports makes a lot of sense... could it not be assumed 
> that if the linux/i386 compatibility environment is installed on a 
> machine, linux/i386 apps will work even if this is not an i386 machine? 
> Same thing when FreeBSD gets linux/*64 support.

linux support exists for other architectures too (only alpha
presently, but others may follow in future).  So just removing the
ONLY_FOR_ARCHS is not good enough since these ports will not run on
all architectures that have a working linux_base; amd64 is a special
case here since it's largely backwards compatible with i386.

What should probably be done is to add amd64 to ONLY_FOR_ARCHS when
those ports are tested and confirmed to work on amd64.

Kris