Debian 7 "Wheezy" to introduce multiarch support

During this year's annual Debian Conference DebConf11 made the introduction of multiarch support a release goal for the coming Debian release 7 Wheezy to be released in 2013. Multiarch is a radical rethinking of the filesystem hierarchy with respect to library and header paths, to make programs and libraries of different hardware architectures easily installable in parallel on the very same system.
Multiarch is a major enhancement to Debian's ability to deliver on the promise of being a universal operating system explains Steve Langasek, driving force of the implementation, not only will it make crossbuilding easier, but also enables better support for legacy 32-bit applications on new 64-bit installations and in the future will even allow live migrations from 32-bit to 64-bit systems.
People interested in the topic can watch the talk by Steve Langasek Multiarch in Debian: 6 months (or 6 years) on today at 16:00 CEST (14:00 UTC) by using the DebConf web frontend.

About Debian

The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal operating system.