[PATCH] Get library installation path for target architecture

[Rich Felker]

On Thu, Mar 23, 2006 at 10:22:56PM -0500, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> On Thursday 23 March 2006 22:18, Rob Landley wrote:
> > On Thursday 23 March 2006 6:55 pm, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> > > i say we  just make it a config option, default it to 'lib', and then
> > > make the user override it if 'lib' rubs them the wrong way
> > >
> > > there is no consensus yet (if there ever will be) as to what the
> > > "correct" location is on any system, whether it be multilib or not
> >
> > I liked /lib.  I knew what /lib meant.  The x86-64 guys who decided that
> > they needed /lib64 instead of moving the _32_bit_ stuff to a new
> > location...  That was sad.
> 
> except not everyone does that ... some distros (like Gentoo) say /lib is 
> always the native install libdir ... other distros (like SuSE i believe) 
> say /lib is always the 32bit libdir if on a multilib architecture ...

My experience is that it's the commercial distros that want to appease
commercial software vendors whose binary packages install into /lib
insist on putting the native libs in /lib64, and the noncommercial,
user-oriented dists put the native stuff in /lib where it belongs.
After all there's absolutely no hope of /lib64 working correctly for
self-compiled programs unless you override --libdir or whatever for
every single package..

> > We already have a busybox installation prefix config entry thing under
> > "installation options".  It would be nice if we could make intelligent use
> > of this and append some stable path (usr/lib, perhaps?) onto it.
> >
> > I dislike punting to the user when it makes the common case of configuring
> > busybox more work for everybody.
> 
> my point was, there is no common case

I would argue that the common case should be putting native libs in
/lib where they have always belonged. Users of dists that insist on
lib64 probably won't compile anything from source, much less busybox..
And I doubt busybox would ever be used on a dual-lib system anyway
since such a system is inherently bloated.

Rich