So, multiarch is going along well in Debian/Ubuntu, and by next distro release Wine should be building as a proper multiarch package. Previous hacks like ia32-libs will be dead for good.
A side effect of this change, however, is the current build daemons ONLY have packages for one architecture. This means that, at build time, you won't be able to pull in the 32-bit packages on a 64-bit build daemon.
From what I understand, this change is originating in Debian (and thus
propagating to Ubuntu). I believe the motivations are mostly ease of management of the build daemons -- only by doing this, for instance, can an entire architecture be properly isolated and self-contained.
This means for bi-arch Wine, we will need to either: - Make Wine support building in pure 64-bit mode and then calling the 32-bit subsystem from a separate binary - Make a very persuasive case that Wine isn't the only package that needs to have multiple architectures at build time
Hopefully I'm overestimating the amount of work involved, as this sort of architecture modularity might be a "nice to have" in Wine anyway.
If none of this is doable by next release, we'll just have a 32-bit only Wine, which isn't really any worse than the situation now.
-Scott Ritchie