Re: 32-bit/64-bit builds on Solaris

[Jan Engelhardt]

On Saturday 2009-04-18 19:21, Monty Taylor wrote:
>
>Solaris on Sparc supports both 32 and 64 bit binaries, with builds
>defaulting to 32-bit. (Thanks backwards compatibility for proprietary
>software!)

On SPARC, choosing 32-bit is an architectural decision rather
than a software or political one.

>By convention, packages that are going to install libs
>install 32-bit libs into ${libdir}/32 and 64-bit libs into ${libdir}/64.
>(Actually, 64 is a link to sparcv9... so there is even some confusion on
>this point)

AFAICS, sparcv9 was the first 64-bit arch in sparcland. So it
seems alright (think about what would happen if sparcv10 came along,
then 64 would only need to be adjusted).

>In a wonderful fit of horribleness, neither GCC nor Sun Studio know
>about this arrangement, so if you want to link against 64-bit libs, you
>have to explicitly add a bunch of -L/usr/lib/64 to your flags.

Well, given that GCC on x86_64 Linuxes do the right thing means that
it's most likely just an oversight on behalf of the one who compiled
GCC.
IIRC, even Linux on SPARC did the right thing (though, it of course
had /usr/lib64, but still did the right thing by looking into all
relevant paths.)