multiarch pulling in i386 packages

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, Feb 02, 2012 at 02:03:03PM +0530, Ritesh Raj Sarraf wrote:
> It has a depends on ia32-libs. In Ubuntu ia32-libs now depends on
> ia32-libs-multiarch, which if I install, will pull in a lot of i386
> arch of the packages.
[...]
> 1 upgraded, 190 newly installed, 0 to remove and 19 not upgraded.
> Need to get 35.9 MB/60.7 MB of archives.
> After this operation, 176 MB of additional disk space will be used.
> Do you want to continue [Y/n]?
> 
> Is this really needed ?

It's not exactly much bigger than the monolithic ia32-libs in oneiric!
ia32-libs-multiarch is a transitional hack intended to install multiarch
equivalents of everything ia32-libs used to install so that packages
that depend on ia32-libs still work; it's never going to end up being
particularly small.

Ideally, you'd just install crossover-pro:i386 and apt would follow only
the :i386 dependencies it needs.  This should just naturally work, and
there should in principle be no need to force dependencies as another
respondent suggests; this model is much more representative of the
promise of multiarch than ia32-libs-multiarch is.  It's possible that
some work on dependency details is needed before this will work
correctly with precise, but it would be better to aim for this.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]