Eagle not available in 11.10 amd64 but i386 package works

[Colin Watson]

On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 05:17:14PM +0100, Dave Lawrence wrote:
> It seems that Eagle (PCB design tool) has disappeared on upgrade to
> 11.10 (64 bit).
> 
> I ran
> sudo apt-get install eagle-data
> Then downloaded the i386 version of the eagle package and ran
> sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture eagle_5.11.0-3ubuntu1_i386.deb

'sudo apt-get install eagle:i386' should also have worked and is more
straightforward.  I believe that's what you're supposed to do now for
this package, given this changelog entry:

  https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/eagle/5.11.0-3ubuntu1

To elaborate on the reason for that change, ia32-libs was a giant blob
of a package with copies of various 32-bit libraries that were needed
for running 32-bit applications on 64-bit systems.  The source package
was over half a gigabyte (I wish I were exaggerating), which meant
hardly any developers ever wanted to touch it.  It was a security
nightmare and often resulted in us shipping out-of-date libraries, and a
30MB package wasn't exactly great for users either.  One of the major
reasons for doing multiarch (although certainly not the only one) was so
that we could take out ia32-libs and burn it, so packages that
previously relied on ia32-libs are now being moved over to multiarch.

> I understand that 11.10 adds some extra support for running 32-bit
> packages in a 64-bit installation but I'm not sure whether that is
> comprehensive.

We're building that up package-by-package.  It should work in this case,
though.

> Is there a case for the package manager offering a 32-bit version of a
> package in the case where the 64-bit version is not available?  This
> might be a general feature or something that's just enabled on a
> package-by-package basis, depending on whether the compatibility is
> universal or not.

It's supposed to do that already.  Did it not in this case?  Which
package management application were you using?

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]