Ubuntu 19.10 will be 64 bit only

[Andrew Eikum]

On Thu, Jun 20, 2019 at 09:59:27AM -0500, Rosanne DiMesio wrote:
> FYI, openSUSE Leap went to 64-bit only releases several versions
> ago, but still continues to provide all the 32 bit baselibs needed to
> build and run Wine. I use it myself without any problems.
> Unfortunately, based on what the Ubuntu article says, I don't have any
> confidence that they even understand what Wine needs, let alone plan
> to provide it.
> 

Yes, I agree. From the FAQ it doesn't seem like they understand Wine's
needs.

Ubuntu ships their own Wine package, right? What are they planning to
do with that package? Maybe we should get in touch with their Wine
maintainer, and whoever is driving this i386 retirement, and confirm
that they 1) understand what Wine actually needs and, 2) don't want to
provide that going forward.

If they don't, then I have a suggestion for our packages: use the
Steam runtime. I see a lot of upsides: They've already solved this
problem; we don't need to re-invent this wheel. Ubuntu is already
working with them to support the use-case. The project is open-source,
well-funded, and has a clear motivation to continue being updated and
functional for the long-term. And people are already building and
running Wine in the runtime today.

We would need to build a couple more packages than we do now, but not
many.  Based on the Proton build system, I think we would need to
build bison, FAudio, gstreamer (and all of its dependencies, notably
glib2), and vkd3d.  Build those against the runtime, package and ship
the runtime itself, and I think we should be in good shape without
having to build and maintain a bunch of 32-bit packages ourselves.

Andrew