[sane-devel] using Epson 2480 Photo with sane

[Julien BLACHE]

Gert Ahrens <gert.ahrens@datahighways.de> wrote:

Hi,

> So my opinion was: "I must definitly get my libraries in /usr/local/lib64" to 
> take effect.
> If I understand you correct, programmers must build all libraries new to work 
> on a 64 bit system. How can SuSE install the libraries in /usr/lib64? Have 
> they changed your configure script or your makefile to do so and why? Isn't 
> it a joke?

They have to patch and/or update the build system so that it will
place the libraries in lib64 on 64bit platforms.

This is dictated by the LSB (Linux Standard Base) and FHS (Filesystem
Hierarchy Standard) which SuSE (and most other distros) wants to
be compliant with. As with every standard, there are good and bad
things in it.

This particular point, in the case of AMD64, is dictated by the "need
for backward compatibility" (which doesn't exist with free software),
ie "users must be able to run 32 bits proprietary apps just as if they
were on an i386 machine". (it becomes silly when they extend the lib64
braindamage to _all_ 64 bits architectures -- well, I definitely don't
like it).

>> ...who think sizeof(int) == sizeof(long) while we're at it ;)
> I fail to see what you mean.

On 32 bits architectures (at least the ones Linux runs on, but this
tends to be true of all 32 bits architectures), an int is 32 bits, so
is a long. On 64 bits architectures, an int is still 32 bits, but a
long is 64 bits. Which causes a lot of interesting problems when
developers use a long type because "a long is 32 bits".

JB.

-- 
Julien BLACHE                                   <http://www.jblache.org> 
<jb@jblache.org>                                  GPG KeyID 0xF5D65169