On Wed, 16 Apr 2008 06:52:49 -0700 Scott Ritchie scott@open-vote.org wrote:
Ove Kaaven wrote:
Debian's ia32-libs package isn't an example of a whole lot. It grabs compiled binaries from the official Debian archive, and nowhere else. It isn't built on a 32-bit system. If ia32-libs had contained binaries that could not be built 100% automatically using Debian's official archive (and only the official archive), it probably wouldn't have gotten into Debian. Besides, ia32-libs is not meant to be a long-lived package, it'll go away eventually.
We've been saying that for 3 years now, and we've only become MORE dependent on ia32-libs in the process. The chief culprit, of course, is Wine, and Wine's need to run 32 bit applications isn't going away soon.
Really, what Debian (and Ubuntu) need is to replace the contents of the ia32-libs package with proper 32 versions of package (sorta like how lib32asound and lib32z1 are now). Fixing that, however, is a bit beyond the scope of the wine-devel list ;)
The real problem with multi-arch libs is, that it's hard to maintain inside debian packages at all...not that it's difficult to compile on amd64 with -m32 , but regarding the different ways of debian/rules writing with all different maintainer ways to write Makefiles for accomplishing this tasks is the most difficult thing.
When there are people interested in going a hard way of fixing todays situation in debian/ubuntu and other distris, please let's do it , sane and with a plan.
Regards, \sh