ia32-libs [was: Bringing Wine into Main]

[Przemek Kulczycki]

On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 10:08 AM, Martin Pitt <martin.pitt at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>> Moving Wine into Main (or whatever becomes of main with the archive
>> reorganization) will require a fair amount of work.  Most of Wine's
>> dependencies are already in main, but on amd64 Wine still requires
>> ia32-libs for about 15 packages that don't have separate lib32 versions.
>
> There is at least the theoretical possibility to only offer wine for
> i386 again, and provide a wrapper package on amd64 to set up an
> appropriate i386 dchroot and install wine in it.
>
>> I'd like to work on Wine in Ubuntu full time, however as a first step to
>> keep me busy I could easily spend a few months modifying these packages
>> to work properly in 32 bit mode on amd64.  This is work that will have
>> to be done eventually anyway, as 32 bit Windows applications are going
>> to be around for a long time.
>
> I disagree here. Changing source packages to build lib32foo packages
> on amd64 is a much better hack than the current ia32-libs package
> (which is EBW, not maintained well, not updated for security fixes,
> horribly brittle, and will make it to main only over my dead cold
> body). But lib32foo is a hack as well, and it utterly complicates
> packaging. I think the time for converting several dozen source
> packages could actually be spent much better with working on proper
> multiarch support (although this takes much more time).
>
> Having worked a bit on ia32-libs over the past years, I more and more
> came to the conclusion that the concept is flawed, and that nowadays
> people would be much better off with an i386 dchroot (with some tricks
> like bind-mounting /home) which can be kept up to date with security
> updates, and doesn't require constant intensive maintenance and source
> package changes.
>
> WDYT?

I'm wondering if we really need a full 64-bit OS and all applications at all.
In [Open]Solaris, only the kernel and some apps are 64-bit, and the
rest is still 32-bit because being 64-bit doesn't give them any
advantage.
I know it's out of scope of this discussion, but maybe instead of
having a separate full 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Ubuntu we could
try a Solaris way and make a one hybrid 64-bit/32-bit os?

-- 
## Przemysław Kulczycki >><< Azrael Nightwalker ##
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