\chapter{Conclusion}

As this thesis shows, multiarch is a very real possibility.  Most of
the building blocks are already in place, but they still need to be
assembled and tested as a whole.  One of the significant missing
pieces is support in the packaging system itself.  A proof-of-concept
prototype has been developed and shown to work.

The toolchain changes are already in some Linux distributions such as
Debian and Ubuntu, and in the pipeline for others where it will be
part of the next stable release.  If the implementation is shown to be
beneficial, it will most likely be adopted by other distributions and
possibly other operating system vendors as well.

The changes in dpkg are still immature and would need a fair amount of
work to become more stable and mature.  The dpkg maintainer (who is
also the author of the ``FeatureDepends'' specification) has expressed
interest in how to best make dpkg multiarch-capable.

Multiarch enables users to run the software they want, in the version
they want on their machines.  It enables software developers to more
easily develop and test for other platforms.  