RFC: Cygwin 64 bit?

[Yaakov (Cygwin/X)]

On Mon, 2011-06-27 at 18:32 -0700, Daniel Colascione wrote:
> On 6/27/2011 6:13 PM, Yaakov (Cygwin/X) wrote:
> > 2) Accomodating the "cyg" prefix is hard enough; using different naming
> > schemes for x86 and x64 would be a disaster.
> 
> How so? The logic for the dealing with the prefix already exists.
> Wouldn't it be a relatively simple matter to make the string used for
> the prefix vary based on the current architecture, especially if both
> variants begin with "cyg"?

The library prefix is coded in lots of places, from build systems
(libtool, cmake, qmake, waf, etc.) to module loaders (GModule, QLibrary,
libltdl, and dozens if not hundreds of programs which handle their own
module loading).  Trying to change all of those to be different on two
different architectures would NOT be a "simple matter".

Besides, wrt to modules, in a multilib setup you have two different
library paths for x86 and x64, so they don't need separate prefixes
anyway (and not always do they use a prefix at all, or you have KDE4
where the module prefix must be "lib" if it exists) and making different
prefixes for shared libraries and loadable modules is out of the
question.

But this still begs the bigger question, why do we need multilib support
at all?


Yaakov