Slackware-current has absorbed my multilib gcc and glibc packages
Quoting: Slackware-current has absorbed my multilib gcc and glibc packages – Alien Pastures —
Ever since the birth of 64-bit Slackware in 2009, I have been maintaining a multilib repository. Today, 15 years later, things are changing!
You may know it or not, depending on your age, but I have created 64-bit Slackware from scratch late 2008 and early 2009 as a project to deal with an inguinal hernia which was really painful, and the subsequent surgery caused me to be stuck to a bed for a while. I re-wrote the SlackBuild for every package in Slackware, and created SlackBuild scripts for a whole lot of other packages that had nothing more than a ‘build’ script. I also wrote all scripts in such a way that they were capable of building 32-bit and 64-bit Slackware from the same source. Pat would not have accepted the burden of having to maintain two trees instead of one.
Not everybody needs a multilib setup, but historically there has been a need, particularly to be able to run old proprietary programs that were available only as 32-bit binaries. And then there’s the whole Microsoft Windows ecosystem of 32-bit commercial programs and games, to be run in emulators such as Wine and a platform like Steam.