\chapter{Evaluation of prototype}

\section{Testing}

Testing clearly shows that the file system level implementation is
solid.  It works well so far without any trouble.  As the
implementation tested is a small-scale implementation without any
programs doing complex operations such as heavy reliance on dlopen(3)
or plugins.  Various programs will most likely have issues when those
files are relocated, but those are most likely fairly easily fixed.

The dpkg prototype implementation is not complete and has a number of
bugs which would need to be fixed before being generally usable.
However, those are not visible in the case that one would use it in
the regular, non-multiarch fashion.

\section{Adoption}

Several of the changes have already been adopted by distributions as
well as upstream.

\begin{itemize}
\item glibc:  The changes to ld-linux.so are already in both Debian 3.1
  ``Sarge'' and Ubuntu 5.04 ``Hoary''.  The changes which split the
  package into different parts will have to wait until the previous
  version of the distribution has support for handling the
  ``Multi-Arch'' field in the control file due to the policy of said
  distributions.
\item binutils: Not yet adopted, but will most likely go in
  post-``Sarge'' and for Ubuntu 5.10 ``Breezy''.
\item gcc:  Not yet adopted, but will most likely go in
  post-``Sarge'' and for Ubuntu 5.10 ``Breezy''.
\item pkg-config: As the author is the current maintainer and
  multiarch support could be added without any additonal breakage, it
  was added a couple of versions back.  Debian 3.1 ``Sarge'' has it
  and Ubuntu 5.10 ``Breezy'' will also have it.
\end{itemize}

As the changes to dpkg are in no way done, stable or tested yet the
package splitting changes have not been adopted by anybody.  They will
simply not make any sense until it is actually possible to have
co-installable packages.

\section{Adoption by upstream}

As most of the patches are fairly new and the work has been to push
them into a distribution rather than all the way to upstream where it
would then trickle downstream to distributions again, there is no
adoption of multiarch by upstream yet.

The prospects look good, however.  There is a fair amount of interest
in multiarch from various distributors as well as from standard bodies
such as the Linux Standards Base and the FHS.  None have moved forward
and actually implemented anything yet as they are waiting for Debian
to show that it is actually possible to make the system work.
