I think all this lib32 stuff is crap. Chroots are the way to go and are so much cleaner.
Allan
I differ to your wisdom =). This sounds exactly like what I surmised when I first searched out the running of 32-bit apps in 64-bit Arch.
In this spirit of "chroots are better" shouldn't it be made easier to maintain a chroot? For example having a 'pacman32' or 'pacmanchroot' package (would simply call pacman with user-configurable chroot locations and has its own pacman.conf)? One of the more 'hassling' things about maintaining my chroot is having to update each chroot separately (yes I could script that, will get round to that someday).
Note that I'm not talking about automating chroot creation (I think Xyne already has a package which does that by abusing the .install file), but simplifying chroot maintenance. And before you say it, yes, patches welcome =). Maybe in August I'll look into it.
I resent your characterization of my post_install function as abuse. No .install files were harmed in the making of my arch32-light package. :) Seriously though, what's wrong with it? All it does is create the minimal chroot directory hierarchy in the "standard" location, create default pacman32* files from the current pacman files, then install the latest version of the 6 packages required for a minimal chroot. If I moved that into the build or package functions then all of those files would be included in the pacman db filelist, which doesn't make sense as they are dynamic (i.e. updating packages in the chroot will create a discrepancy between that list and the actual files). I'm obviously biased, but I think arch32-light is a very clean and easy way to set up and manage a 32-bit chroot. Here's the AUR page if anyone wants to take a look: http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=37398 *pacman32 is a wrapper for the host's pacman to facilitate chroot package management from outside of the chroot, as you've described. It's trivial to write an alias or script to manage a chroot now that pacman includes the "--arch" option (note that pacman32 in this package does a bit more by e.g. ensuring that the arch32 daemon is running).