A proposal raised last week for Fedora 44 was to drop i686 support with ending multi-lib and x86 32-bit packages support. But following a fair amount of opposition to the idea, this matter isn’t going to be pursued for next spring’s Fedora 44 release.
Similar to the Fedora change proposal last week that wanted to replace the X.Org Server with the XLibre fork and then that idea was withdrawn days later, this proposal around ending the Fedora i686 support has also been withdrawn.
This change proposal for Fedora 44 (not Fedora 43 due out this autumn) is withdrawn following much opposition in recent days around ending the x86 32-bit software packages / multi-lib support on Fedora Linux.
Fabio Valentini was one of the change proposal authors and also a Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) member who this weekend announced he’d be dropping the proposal. Fabio commented:
Given feedback in this thread (and to a lesser extent, also on the mailing list) I have decided to withdraw this proposal.
It is clear that the Fedora 44 target for this Change was too early. To some degree, I expected this to be the case, and was prepared to move the proposed implementation of the Change to a later release. Fedora 44 was just the earliest “reasonable” target. However, I think this also shows an inherent conflict in the current Changes process – if a big Change (like this one) is submitted quite early (out of caution!), that also front-loads the discussion and decision process instead of giving things more time. For example, I don’t think the discussion would have been meaningfully different if the targeted release had been Fedora 46 instead of 44 – which is one of the reasons why I decided to withdraw the change instead of just re-targeting it at a later Fedora release.
I don’t think the problem that was attempted to be addressed with this proposal will go away. With more and more projects dropping official support for building / running their software on 32-bit architectures, it’s just going to get worse over the next few years. Dealing with widely used software falling out from under our feet won’t be fun. To some degree, always pushing the latest and greatest :tm: software in Fedora is also working against us here – if we just stuck with foo 1.0 LTS for 10 years, we just wouldn’t need to care that foo 3.0 dropped support for running on 32-bit systems …
I am disappointed in some of the reactions this :double_exclamation_mark: proposal :double_exclamation_mark: has received, with some people apparently reading it in the most uncharitable way. It was a proposal that tried to address technical problems package maintainers and release engineering is facing, not some conspiracy to break the “gaming use case”. That said, I was expecting a lot of feedback feedback on this one, but not hundreds of people shouting “DON’T DO THIS WHY DON’T YOU CARE ABOUT YOUR USERS I WILL SWITCH DISTROS IMMEDIATELY levels of feedback (though to some degree, I also blame clickbait “tech press” or YouTubers for that …)
I am now looking forward to seeing actual (and actionable) counter-proposals.
We’ll see what counter-proposals are raised and ultimately how many Fedora Linux cycles before a similar change is made for phasing out multi-lib support for old x86 32-bit software.
