32-bit Firefox (Re: How long will 64bit Ubuntu users have towait?)

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Sun, Sep 10, 2006 at 03:59:46PM -0400, Saad Shakhshir wrote:
> Kilz, I don't think there is a disagreement here on whether or not Ubuntu
> should have improved 64-bit support.  It is simply a question of priorities
> and limited resources.  As Matt and Mark have said, Canonical is not going
> to contribute additional resources to this right now.

What Mark and I said on that subject was that we would not be implementing
multiarch.  I'm quite open to other proposals for improving the usefulness
of the amd64 port.

> On the other hand, Ubuntu welcomes and in fact embraces contributions made
> from the community.  Matt made it explicit that instead of maintaining your
> own repository for the packages you have created, post them to be uploaded
> to the official Ubuntu repositories.

This would be a good start.  There are at least two ways to integrate this,
either as a duplicated source package (in universe) or an additional binary
package built by the existing firefox source package.

The latter would be preferable, as it avoids duplicating the source and
automatically stays up to date as the package changes.  The bi-arch support
in our compiler should make it possible to build both 64-bit and 32-bit
binaries during the same build, if the necessary development packages are
arranged.

-- 
 - mdz