Installation Media and supportability of i386 in 18.04 LTS Re: Ubuntu Desktop on i386

[Bryan Quigley]

On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 2:34 PM, Josh DuBois <duboisj at codeweavers.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 9:54 AM, Dimitri John Ledkov <xnox at ubuntu.com>
> wrote:
>
>> 18.10+:
>> * Stop providing i386 port
>> * Run legacy i386 only application in snaps / containers / virtual
>> machines
>
> In terms of running legacy i386 applications in
> snaps / containers / VMs only, Wine is a major user of 32-bit
> libraries which I didn't seen mentioned on this thread.  Many of the
> apps people run with Wine are legacy 32-bit only Windows applications
> where recompiling to 64-bit is simply not an option.

Wine hasn't been mentioned publicly but it was definitely mentioned a
lot in the survey I did.   We certainly want to make sure users can
keep using it.

> Wine users should be fine using a 64-bit .iso image for install purposes,
> but the need to package a full set of 32-bit libraries would be a major
> burden for wine packagers.  In particular Wine needs access to the graphics
> stack, the 32-bit version of which was mentioned in this thread as possibly
> expendable.

That's certainly something we would need to look into.

> By way of disclosure, I am the product manager for CodeWeavers' CrossOver, a
> commercial wrapper for Wine.  I think all Wine users would be negatively
> impacted
> if 32-bit libraries were no longer available from Ubuntu, however.  Please
> keep
> that in mind as you decide when and whether to drop 32-bit libraries or
> merely
> cease building 32-bit install .isos.
>
> We'd really like to have the libraries stick around.

It's actually even more complicated than that.  Wine depends on
Multiarch for building itself in Debian/Ubuntu.  For instance when I
install wine, I'm actually installing both a 32-bit and 64-bit binary
of wine.

I could see us:
* Determine Snappy is the best way to distribute Wine (which would
require the bundling of 32-bit libs I think).
* Keep a small amount of i386 libs/apps in 18.10+ including whatever
it takes to build/run Wine (but drop the majority of packages)
* Change Wine a bit to make this easier (no idea what this would
entail, but we have 2+ years).

In any case, I'm not going to push for dropping the i386 port until we
have a good way for Wine to work. As mentioned we aren't planning to
really consider that until 2018.  The focus now is purely on dropping
32-bit install isos and select related packages.

Thanks!
Bryan