Ubuntu 19.10 will be 64 bit only

[Dmitry Timoshkov]

Rosanne DiMesio <dimesio at earthlink.net> wrote:

> https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/i386-architecture-will-be-dropped-starting-with-eoan-ubuntu-19-10/11263
> 
> A user has already asked about this on the forum. https://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=32565
> 
> The immediate question for me is whether to even bother trying to package Wine for Ubuntu 19.10 and up. The suggestion from Ubuntu is to use the 32 bit libraries from 18.04, which will be supported until 2023. It's theoretically possible for me to build the 32 bit side on the OBS using the libraries from 18.04, but that would lead to a mismatch in library versions the 32 and 64 bit sides were built against. Apt requires the i386 and amd64 versions of packages match or it will refuse to install them, so unless that changes, users of 19.10 and up will be unable to install the 32 bit libraries they need to run Wine, unless they downgrade a significant part of their system to the 18.04 versions. 
> 
> I could build pure 64 bit Wine packages for Ubuntu. We've been telling users for 10 years that pure 64 bit Wine is not supported, but with so many systems going 64 bit only, perhaps it's time to reconsider that policy. There are certainly more 64 bit Windows apps now than there used to be, so it wouldn't be completely useless. The downside of doing that is that we will spend a lot of time explaining to users that pure 64 bit Wine will not run 32 bit programs, no matter how many places we plaster that information. The upside is that if we change that policy, I'm ready to go with pure 64 bit CentOS 7 packages.
> 
> Thoughts? Perhaps this should be discussed at WineConf?

Many 64-bit applications still use either a 32-bit installer or some
32-bit components. In comparison 64-bit Windows will support 32-bit
(probably) forever.

-- 
Dmitry.