Statement on 32-bit i386 packages for Ubuntu 19.10 and 20.04 LTS

[jonathon]

This is encouraging, though I still think there’s a lack of communication clarity between “i386” and “32-bit”, e.g.:

There is real risk to anybody who is running a body of software that gets little testing. The facts are that most 32-bit x86 packages are hardly used at all. That means fewer eyeballs, and more bugs. Software continues to grow in size at the high end, making it very difficult to even build new applications in 32-bit environments.

which seems to be conflating i386 packages with 32-bit libraries used by 64-bit installations…

None of the announcements so far have made clear whether 32-bit libraries will continue to be available to the 64-bit OS. Even:

It has always been our intention to maintain users’ ability to run 32-bit applications on 64-bit Ubuntu – our kernels specifically support that.

is still vague (kernel config flags don’t mean much without the supporting userland).

I don’t think anyone is really against dropping i386 as an architecture, but the real concern is how to support 32-bit applications on a 64-bit installation.

Snaps etc. for 32-bit applications are (IMO) over-engineered solutions to a solved problem:

Would a community-supported i386 repo be viable?

If the aim is to provide 32-bit libraries for amd64 systems then the “better” approach would be to package lib32-* versions, e.g. lib32-curl . No extra repository or architecture is needed, just more/different packages, and those packages can be built and updated alongside their 64-bit counterparts by the same infrastructure. This is already done for a number of packages in the Ubuntu repos, and it’s the approach taken by other distros, so it works. If I can find time next week I might put to…

If there’s any concern that 32-bit libraries won’t build with newer software versions then keep in mind that rolling-release distros are already using this approach and they haven’t broken yet.