On Wed, Nov 17, 2021 at 10:07 PM Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski <dominik@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Wednesday, 17 November 2021 at 18:58, Peter Robinson wrote: > [...] > > What else is there that people care about in Fedora that's only i686? > > There are some old proprietary games with i686-only binaries. I'll check > which packages are required by the ones I have. I think the easy answer here is, indeed, "games". And for some Fedora users, that might not be an important use case. But given the increased interest in "Gaming on Linux" (even though some tech YouTubers still consider Fedora a hat meme distro), I think this is something Fedora as an increasingly popular "mainstream" linux distribution should definitely continue to support. However, wine, as packaged for Fedora - I assume to support running both 32-bit and 64-bit windows applications - requires both x86_64 and i686 libraries on x86_64: $ sudo dnf repoquery --requires wine --resolve --recursive | grep i686 | wc -l 255 So, wine needs i686 multilib packages on x86_64 even if you don't want to use it to run games, but just for running *any* Windows application. Additionally, the steam RPM (as provided by the opt-in third-party repository that comes installed by default with Fedora Workstation) is a i686-only package (sad face), and hence also pulls in i686 libraries: $ sudo dnf repoquery --requires steam --resolve --recursive | grep i686 | wc -l 221 And any "older" games you want to play from Steam (or GOG, or wherever) will also require i686 libraries, as they're probably 32-bit only applications (if they're even linux native binaries, otherwise they'll require wine, which *also* pulls in i686 libraries). Considering there's a big overlap between those two package sets (steam + wine dependencies) and that some of those i686-arch packages are actually subpackages of the same source package, the number of i686 packages we need to support for the two only important use cases of i686 multilib should be around 200, plus their build-only dependencies. Two Hundred (or even make it 300) packages - that's around 1% of the whole corpus of Fedora packages (with almost 23000 source packages in rawhide). Which I think confirms my suspicion that just building *everything* for i686 is 99% wasteful ... (Yes, yes, I know that some of those 23000 packages are noarch, like python or perl stuff ... don't go fetching your torches and pitchforks just yet.) Fabio _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam on the list, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure
