Debian 7 Wheezy to introduce multiarch support

July 26th, 2011

During this year's annual Debian Conference DebConf11 made the introduction of multiarch support a release goal for the coming Debian release 7 Wheezy to be released in 2013. Multiarch is a radical rethinking of the filesystem hierarchy with respect to library and header paths, to make programs and libraries of different hardware architectures easily installable in parallel on the very same system.

Multiarch is a major enhancement to Debian's ability to deliver on the promise of being a universal operating system explains Steve Langasek, driving force of the implementation, not only will it make crossbuilding easier, but also enables better support for legacy 32-bit applications on new 64-bit installations and in the future will even allow live migrations from 32-bit to 64-bit systems.

People interested in the topic can watch the talk by Steve Langasek Multiarch in Debian: 6 months (or 6 years) on today at 16:00 CEST (14:00 UTC) by using the DebConf web frontend.

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