On Sun, 06 Jan 2008 09:56:32 +0200
Danny Braniss <danny@cs.huji.ac.il> wrote:

quoted text
> what Apple has is one file, that will run the appropiate binary if run
> on an i386 or a ppc, not 2 different files - universal binary - not rosetta.

Sure, but that's got a bunch of different driving factors.  I
don't know, for example, whether you can build a four-way
executable (ia32, x86_64, ppc, ppc64).  Well, you probably can,
but I'd be a bit surprised if anyone has.  FreeBSD supports even
more architectures: it just doesn't scale.  The best bet for
something that has to run everywhere is probably LLVM or TNEF.

The advantage that Unix has over MacOS is that we aren't trying
to squeeze everything into single "application" directories.  So
it's reasonable to have "share", and select executables on the
basis of PATH.  That's how it has worked before.  Most sites
don't have more than two or three different architectures to
support, anyway.

If we do get much further with multi-architecture bin and lib,
and people actively use these on diskless setups or
multi-architecture hosts (amd64/ia32, or other 64/32 bit
combinations being the most common) then perhaps it would be nice
to have a share/bin where platform-independent scripts (shell,
perl, python) as well as dynamic-translated binaries (JVM, LLVM,
etc) can live?

Cheers,

-- 
Andrew
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