[CentOS] Is Biarch with 6.x now dead?

[Michael Lampe]

Maybe we're talking about different things here. I'm definitely not 
talking about how to build a distribution. That's why I'm using your's 
on not running my own.

I'm talking about the usefulness of biarch. Not in the sense of building 
packages for redistribution, especially not as RPMs. It's just for 
building code for one's own purposes.

Take an arbitrary source package and run configure. It may fail even on 
CentOS 6.2. So what?

Now, some run of configure fails on x86_64 in 32-bit mode. So what again?

To build a distribution (large, but something of a well defined size!), 
you need a build environment, which works for everything in a well 
defined way.

I only need an environment, in which I can make concrete things work 
easily, and that gives me the basics. For any piece of source code 
outside the core distribution, I'm not getting anything else anyway, not 
even in 64-bit mode.

People, who write their own code, expect never anything else.

And Biarch gives this to you equally well if you want to compile and run 
32-bit programs on 64-bit.

-Michael

PS: This is (of course) not for building RPMs, but the configure scripts 
I was interested in so far, work with this in my ~/.tcshrc:

-------------------------------------------------------------------
...
alias linux32 "linux32 $SHELL"
...
if ( `uname -m` == i686 ) then
     setenv CC "gcc -m32"
     setenv CXX "g++ -m32"
     setenv PKG_CONFIG_PATH /usr/lib/pkgconfig
endif
...
-------------------------------------------------------------------

 > linux32
 > configure
 > ... etc. ...

And if you have your own Makefiles, just put in two or three '-m32' and 
your set.