ia32-libs

[Steve Langasek]

Phill,

On Sat, Jan 04, 2014 at 06:42:18PM +0000, Phill Whiteside wrote:
> hope you have had a great time over the festive season. Sadly, the British
> government and IT projects that work seem mutually exclusive.  I did try
> the multi-arch approach to solve the issue of running said government's
> portal.  I'm not sure how much input Canonical has on the push for use of
> linux / F/oss within the government departments.  It was, as is usual for
> politics, announced with much sound bites, but...  as usual we have seen
> very little.  The case of H.M.  Revenues being one.  It cannot work with
> the 'proper' libraries.  In an ideal world, some one would get a kick up
> the backside to do the work - but, until then; we have to use what is
> given.

For the past three cycles, the ia32-libs package has been nothing but a
wrapper that pulls in the corresponding multiarch versions of a set of
libraries.  The problem with ia32-libs is that the set of libraries it
pulled in is arbitrary, and unrelated to what's needed by any given user. 
It just /happened/ to work for most users, because it included the 32-bit
libraries that were most commonly needed.  The problem is that it included a
large number of them.

There was no functionality provided by the ia32-libs package which is not
available by installing the individual 32-bit libraries directly.  The only
question is which libraries you need for your particular application.

If you need help determining which libraries you need to install, I would
suggest asking on one of the Ubuntu support forums such as askubuntu.com.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org

> On 4 January 2014 17:49, Martin Pitt <martin.pitt at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> 
> > Hello Phill,
> >
> > Phill Whiteside [2013-12-29 18:29 +0000]:
> > > and then we get the plug pulled for 32bit library?....
> >
> > ia32-libs has always been a royal pain, gaping security hole (because
> > it never really received security updates) and a hack. It was dropped
> > in favor of proper "multi-arch" [1] so that you can install the real
> > i386 binary packages on an amd64 machine.
> >
> > Martin
> >
> > [1] https://wiki.debian.org/Multiarch
> >
> > --
> > Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
> > Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)
> >
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/phillw

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