[OpenIndiana-discuss] Building Applications

[Alasdair Lumsden]

On 14 Oct 2010, at 22:31, Kevin J. Woolley wrote:

> I don't believe a combined 32/64-bit Perl is possible.  If it was, it'd still be pretty icky, from an implementation point of view.  (Is it possible for a 64-bit binary to dynamically load 32-bit libs?  I'm pretty sure the reverse isn't possible.)

There was a bit of talk on #oi-dev about this this evening and some thoughts were:

1. It'd be nice to yank perl 5.8.4 from ONNV (but for the time being, still require perl 5.10 to be installed to build/use the OS, but use the one from SFW)
2. Perhaps at some point in the future remove the dependency on Perl for the OS to run (would require rewriting things)
3. Add 64bit support to the perl 5.10 SFW package so it becomes a combined 32bit/64bit package, similar to the Python package.

Basically the combined 32bit/64bit package would follow the usual ISA conventions of eg. /usr/bin/perl, /usr/bin/amd64/perl, with separate 32bit and 64bit extension directories. That way if you run a 32bit perl, it uses 32bit extensions, and for 64bit perl it uses 64bit extensions.

Obviously if you use 32bit CPAN to install modules they'll only appear in the 32bit extensions dir (and vice versa for 64bit), which might be confusing for some people, but at least it would provide the 64bit option.

So perhaps not too impossible, and hopefully not too icky. Just need someone who has the time to implement it, either by modifying/extending the SFW Perl 5.10 build, or to replace that with a JDS style specfile.

Cheers,

Alasdair