[Pkg-ia32-libs-maintainers] Bug#694758: Bug#694758: ia32-libs: cannot upgrade

[Goswin von Brederlow]

On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 07:36:35PM -0600, Michael Shuler wrote:
> Upgrading these packages require adding i386 as an installable
> architecture for multiarch, however, this upgrade is now highly
> invasive.. I have not gone down the path of debugging all the
> dependencies pulled in, but this makes me a bit sad, as many irrelevant
> (to me) i386 libs are installed, which will be nothing more than clutter
> and a substantial amount of additional bandwidth used during upgrades
> down the road..
> 
> Michael

It should be noted that ia32-libs and ia32-libs-gtk now depend on the
libs they previously contained as binary copies. So while you get many
new libraries they should basically balance out with the contents
dropped from ia32-libs and ia32-libs-gtk itself, i.e. you already had
most of those irrelevant libs but didn't know it. Doesn't balance perfectly
but roughly. There are some packages that are now in the dependency chain
that should have been in ia32-libs or ia32-libs-gtk in squeeze but
nobody ever cared enough. Also anything only mentioned as recommends will
probably be new. Again if nobody cared they weren't added to ia32-libs
or ia32-libs-gtk.

If you want to minimize the amount of new packages there are 2 things
you can do:

1) Turn of recommends when upgrading the 32bit stuff.

2) Replace those amd64 packages with 32bit software (those that depend
on ai32-libs or ia32-libs-gtk) with the i386 packages that depend on
the specific 32bit libraries needed. After that you can remove ia32-libs
and ia32-libs-gtk instead of upgrading it.

Thank you for testing the upgrade even if I'm afraid we can't do anything
about the bloat.

MfG
	Goswin