Multilib in Gentoo

multilib-in-gentoo

Sven Vermeulen Wed 02 July 2014

One of the areas in Gentoo that is seeing lots of active development is its ongoing effort to have proper multilib support throughout the tree. In the past, this support was provided through special emulation packages, but those have the (serious) downside that they are often outdated, sometimes even having security issues.

But this active development is not because we all just started looking in the same direction. No, it's thanks to a few developers that have put their shoulders under this effort, directing the development workload where needed and pressing other developers to help in this endeavor. And pushing is more than just creating bugreports and telling developers to do something.

It is also about communicating, giving feedback and patiently helping developers when they have questions.

I can only hope that other activities within Gentoo and its potential broad impact work on this as well. Kudos to all involved, as well as all developers that have undoubtedly put numerous hours of development effort in the hope to make their ebuilds multilib-capable (I know I had to put lots of effort in it, but I find it is worthwhile and a big learning opportunity).