No i386 packages in APT repository for Ubuntu for LLVM 19

[eloj]

I hesitate to open this linux packaging issue, but I found #113438 which is similar so here we go.

The Ubuntu LLVM repos (at least for Noble) lack i386 support.

$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/llvm-clang.list 
deb http://apt.llvm.org/noble/ llvm-toolchain-noble-19 main
$ apt update
...
N: Skipping acquire of configured file 'main/binary-i386/Packages' as repository 'http://apt.llvm.org/noble llvm-toolchain-noble-19 InRelease' doesn't support architecture 'i386'

This recently caused the Linux Mint 22.1 Xia¹ automatic updater ("Update Manager") to uninstall Steam from my system.

This is because they're releasing a suite of new mesa packages (mesa=24.2.8-1ubuntu1~24.04.1), multiple of which depend on libllvm19. This probably wouldn't be a problem, if it wasn't for the fact that Steam infamously depends on a lot of 32-bit libraries.

I don't have the whole dependency chain, but one specific example that my system pointed to after being broken was "mesa-libgallium:i386 : Depends: libllvm19:i386 but it is not installable"

The way this was resolved by apt is to basically uninstall 40'ish packages, including 'steam-libs', and with it went Steam.

Unless I'm wrong in my analysis, the only way forward is for the repos to have i386 packages, or for me to stop using them, because having them enabled will likely continue to break Steam/mesa going forward. I'm just glad my whole desktop environment didn't go poof.

Obviously this isn't the fault of the LLVM project, but I wanted to make the greater cosmos aware of this interaction.

Footnotes

1. which is derived from Ubuntu 24.04 Noble. ↩

[eloj]

I finally saw the wording on apt.llvm.org about i386 being for Debian only, so it seems clear (which I suspected but did not know for sure) that this is by design.

Closing this issue, sorry for the noise.