Proposal to change non-flattened build behavior

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

I'm really pleased that Eric Heintzman (taking over as the only active Debian 
maintainer for GNUstep) has recently been working hard to update Debian 
packages to the latest releases (he's done make and base, and is currently 
working on gui/back).

It seems to me that we should help him as much as possible, and in light of the 
fact that Debian adopted a system for multi-architecture installation a few 
years ago (not the GNUstep one  ... but not all that dissimilar), I'd like to 
change our multi-architecture support to match.  IMO adopting their scheme, as 
well as aiding packaging, would actually simplify the layout a little.

What i'm thinking of is:

When building non-flattened, the subdirectory name for libraries/binaries would 
be changed for Debian compatibility (and simplicity) to use a directory
whose name is of the form architecture/library-combo rather than nested 
directories of the form cpu/os-abi/library-combo.
The architecture name format is a sanitised triplet cpu-os-abi (where 
previously we had cpu/os-abi).

When building non-flattened, header files would be installed in an architecture 
and library-combo dependent subdirectory in the same way that binary libraries
are installed.  This removes an inconsistency and makes sense with Debian 
multi-arch support which puts headers in an architecture specific subdirectory.

Architecture specific resource files would similarly be installed in the 
modified directory hierarchy.

Obviously this would take significant changes to gnustep-make, as well as 
modifications in gnustep-base to look things up in the right place.  Anyone 
building non-flattened with the existing layout would of course need to do a 
clean install after the change, but I don't think that would much bother the 
kind of people who use the multi-arch layout anyway.

Comments?