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

[Matthias Klose]

Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> 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.

It should be possible, but would require a huge amount of package be 
built for 32bit support; in general, that's not a difficult, but just 
time consuming task. If you want to go this way, maybe look at the 
existing zlib, ncurses5 and bzip2 packages.

The alternative to build an ia32-firefox packages seems to be odd now, 
that we seem to be able to drop the ia32 packages from main having an 
native OpenOffice.org build on amd64.

   Matthias