[Mageia-marketing] Mageia product naming/scoping

[Bradley D. Thornton]

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On 03/31/2011 02:04 AM, Romain d'Alverny wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 02:03, Bradley D. Thornton <Bradley at northtech.us> wrote:
>> On 03/30/2011 11:29 AM, Patricia Fraser wrote:
>>>> On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 11:31, Romain d'Alverny
>>>> <rdalverny at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>  * Mageia 1 DVD (32 or 64bit)
>>
>> Yeah, that's not going to happen. the 32 bit will be 32 bit, while the
>> 64 bit will be dual arch (below).
>>
>> Very, very few Distros ship a pure 64 bit GNU/Linux, and Mageia isn't
>> going to be one of them, FYI.
> 
> Well there may be some misunderstanding here; that's two separate things:
>  * dual arch hosts both 32bit and 64bit installs, of which you decide
> on install;

Yes I understand what you're saying there, although calling it dual
arch, in comparison to what other distros refer to when using that term,
I think may be a little confusing.

But I understand what you are trying to convey with that moniker.

>  * 64bit DVD is a full install DVD for 64bit architectures - yes,
> there are some 32bit dependencies still used, but there are fewer of
> them; the intent/direciton is a pure 64bit thing - whatever time it
> takes.

This is the point I was bringing up. A quick tour through git repo's and
it becomes quickly apparent the the 64 bit version is dual arch, with
the full complement of 32 bit libraries and compiler support for 32 bit
apps.

And there's quite a bit more than a little. There's really no way to
accurately determine just how long it will have to remain that way, or
if the actual direction will end up completely eliminating 32 bit
enabled libs, gcc, etc.

There's a huge amount of software out there that just won't do prime
time in 64 at this point in time. Right off the top of my head some of
those in the higher profile category currently include:

Wine
Skype
Google Earth

and hundreds of common utilities and tools barely maintained, some part
of Gnu, but most independant, like bing, for example, a little tool I
use in scripts for monitoring bandwidth, and a host of others.

As we all move forward in time, yes, there will be very little need for
Mageia or any other distro to maintain dual arch support in the 64 bit
versions of their distros, but there's a lot of 32 bit enabled aspects
of the upcoming Mageia '64' that is going to be there for a long time.

I run a pure 64bit OS on a few of my systems, on the servers it's not
that big a deal, SAMBA, APACHE, MySQL/MariaDB, NFS, DNS - these
definately aren't issues, and it is conceivable (If we were willing to
leave out a few items) that we could have a pure 64 bit server edition,
although it probably still wouldn't be prudent at this time, to garner
the widest acceptance.

But anything along the line of a workstation platform would be severly
hurt by not providing support for 32 and 64 bit ready applications.

I'm still running the beta version of 64 bit Flash plugin on my laptop
workstation, and although I haven't checked to see if the stable version
has actually been released yet, I do find the beta version sufficiently
stable - but it looks like most beta software in that respect isn't
going to be included w/Mageia 1.

Eliminating support for 32bit architecture apps would mean no
Quickbooks, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, (maybe even Adobe Reader - I'm not
actually sure about that one because I use xpdf and okular).

For those reasons, the decision isn't really up for a peopled decision,
and is indeed reflected in our repos.

i.e., From an average consumers point of view, coming from say, MS
Windows, I think the perception would be that 32 bit would be 32 bit,
while 64 bit would support 32 bit as well - instead of choosing an
install that *either only* supports pure 32 bit or pure 64 bit
installations.

It took us a long time to completely migrate away from 16 bit apps, and
there's still remnants here and there where you need that environment -
only for support of old DOS programs, but neverhteless, needed [by some] :)

Bringing up the topic wasn't a suggestion on my part, it was just a
statement about how things really are laid out in Mageia.

> 
> Ennael tells me we ought to re-explain what is expected in these
> formats. But of course, after beta1, we will hold a survey to sort
> through expectations of the final formats we will release in June.

Oh yes we've ample time to finalize what we're going to call each
packaged spin of our distro :)


- -- 
Bradley D. Thornton
Manager Network Services
NorthTech Computer
TEL: +1.760.666.2703  (US)
TEL: +44.702.405.1909 (UK)
http://NorthTech.EU

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