this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2025
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Followup question, if you don't mind! What still needs to be maintained on the Win32 system on behalf of the Fedora maintainers? If everyone has moved on from 32bit, and the old stuff doesn't change, where is the maintenance requirement? Could we not find a "final" version and leave it static, but still available in the package manager?
Is it that packaging requirements change for different systems to keep up with hardware drivers/new package managers/kernel removing deprecated features/security vulnerability patches?
The problem is that it's not old unchanging code, people want the latest supported version so they can still run their 32-bit binaries with the latest supporting libraries.
And if the upstream developers don't consider 32-bit support important, then it falls on the distro maintainers to patch the code to keep it running in these situations.
That's essentially what has happened in some distros like Arch Linux where you have to explicitly install the 32bit versions alongside the 64bit versions.
Also, Steam provides some 32bit libraries exactly for this reason.
For one, its just a burden for maintainers to continue to make sure stuff still works with the presence of those libraries. Unmaintained software is increasingly subject to vulnerabilities, adding an additional burden for maintainers that cover off on the security aspect of packages. It also can hold back further development in other areas simply because they need to be able to install those older 32bit libraries.
The solution to a lot of these problems is containerisation, whereby you're effectively able to shift these issues off into their own area that has no affect on the rest of the operating system, but can be safely accessed when needed.