[Pkg-ia32-libs-maintainers] More 32 bit libraries, improve search for libs

[Urs Thuermann]

Hello,

aptitude shows a number of 32-bit library debian packages for use on
amd64 systems.  But the selection of libraries is rather small and I
need a number of additional libs (only shared objects, in order to run
32-bit executables built on a 32-bit system):

        libmpg123, libfaac, libfaad, libao, libid3tag

For simplicity, I just copied the shared objects from the 32-bit
system to /usr/lib32 which mostly worked.  But I would prefer having
debian packages to be installed instead of just copying into /usr.

So my questions is if it's planned to include more 32-bit libraries
into the amd64 repository?


Some problems and suggestions:

1. I first tried to install the shared objects to /usr/local/lib32 but
   then noticed that this directory is obviously not searched by
   /lib/ld-linux.so.2 but I can achieve that by using LD_LIBRARY_PATH.  
   Running strings -a on /lib/ld-linux.so.2 it seems that it also
   looks in /etc/ld.so.cache but ldconfig seems to only look for
   64-bit libs and puts them into /etc/ld.so.cache.  I suggest having
   an ldconfig32 which reads /etc/ld.so.conf32 and writes the results
   to /etc/ld.so.cache32 and changing /lib/ld-linux.so.2 so that it
   reads /etc/ld.so.cache32.

2. Just copying libao from a 32-bit Debian system doesn't work, since
   it searches /usr/lib/ao/plugins-4 where it only find 64-libs.  So
   it should probably configure to look in /usr/lib32/ao/plugins-4 and
   plugin shared objects should go there.  This may be as easy as
   calling

        ./configure --libdir=/usr/lib32

   if libao is autoconf-based (I haven't yet looked into src).

What is your opinion on this?

urs