Bertrand Jacquin posted
<43872d370603280717w2b6ccbd9l9dae6e21a9a927d2@...>, excerpted
below,  on Tue, 28 Mar 2006 17:17:27 +0200:

> How could you compile mplayer or firefox in your 64 bits environnement
> to generate 32 bits binary ? I have multilib activated and I can't
> build mplayer with CFLAGS="-m32".
> 
> It is needing something else ?
>
> I don't want too to have and maintain a 32 bit chroot.

There /are/ the 32-bit precompiled packages for those in the tree,
firefox-bin and mplayer-bin, if you want to merge them.  Note that these
use different executable names so you can even have both your regular
64-bit and the 32-bit-binary versions merged side by side.

As for why you can't seem to compile the 32-bit binaries, it's very
possibly because you are missing certain of the libraries and other
dependencies, or more likely, the 32-bit headers for them necessary for
compilation.  Naturally, you could track all this stuff manually, but
that's what portage is for -- only it can track only one bitness at a
time.  Thus, the idea of a 32-bit chroot, complete with its own instance
of portage, which can track all the 32-bit dependencies necessary to
compile in 32-bit what you really want, firefox and mplayer, in this case.
Sure, it's /possible/ to track all those dependencies manually, but it's
/far/ easier to run a chroot for the purpose and let portage do what
portage does well -- automate all that stuff for you so you don't have to
worry about it.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman in
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html


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