How long will 64bit Ubuntu users have to wait?

[Scott Ritchie]

On Sat, 2006-09-30 at 19:45 +0100, Toby Smithe wrote:
> I think everybody needs to calm down. Think about what you're posting
> before you post. As for eye candy: Edgy was not destined for this. It
> has no improved eye candy support compared to Dapper except a more up to
> date Xorg version. This was not a feature which time was spent
> developing. Other, more important features, were.

I'm sorry I missed this discussion until now, as it all feels like it's
partially my fault.

There is no working Wine 64-bit package at WineHQ for a very simple
reason: I can't get it to compile.  I've seen and attempted several
different hacks for getting Wine to compile (in 32 bit mode) on a 64 bit
system, but none of them have worked for me.  If they do, packaging it
up would be rather straightforward.

\sh: Thanks for taking the effort to move my packages into edgy.  I
don't quite have the time to maintain an edgy environment myself right
now.  Heck, I don't even HAVE a 64 bit machine to play with and have to
borrow a friend's every once and a while whenever I decide to try making
the 64 bit package again.  With summer over and school back in full
swing, this is even less likely.


As for the 32 bit library issue, I can't emphasize enough how important
it is to keep 32 bit application support, even if it's for no reason
other than Wine alone.  A long time ago I filed a bug against the
ia32libs package asking for a few more to be added for Wine purposes,
but it's been (from what I can tell) ignored.  For a while I considered
creating them myself in an ia32libs-wine package, but it soon became
apparent that it would be quite a bit of work and no one's paying me to
do it.

The reason for maintaining 32 bit support is simple: users want to run
32 bit Windows programs.  Almost all Windows programs out there today
are solely available in 32 bit, and a 64-bit Wine that only ran apps for
64-bit Windows would be about as useless as the suggestion that users
stop running the applications they want to.

Maybe for Edgy+1 I'll have more time to work on integrating Wine into
Ubuntu, or perhaps a miracle will happen and the dev team will adopt my
Better Integrated Wine Spec:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BetterIntegratedWineSpec


Thanks,
Scott Ritchie