On Fri, 2026-08-14 at 10:12 +0100, Simon McVittie wrote: > It would be completely fine for the scope of i386 in Debian to > continue to decrease, as long as it still has the parts needed by > legacy 32-bit binaries (basically glibc, Mesa, Wine's > dependencies[1], and their recursive dependencies and build-deps).
The closed source printer drivers for Brother laser printers & “multifunctionals”, which are available as .rpm & .deb from Brother’s website (and Ubuntu packages in multiverse¹), are only available as 32- bit binaries, but they only need glibc (I think). (Yes, Brother is selling printers *today* that only work with 32-bit binary drivers…) The other reverse dependencies on libc6-i386 in Ubuntu all seem to be development-related tools. There probably are other, maybe less common, third party/proprietary applications (outside Brother printers & Windows applications) that might still need this too. ¹ https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=brother+lpr&searchon=names -- Jan Claeys (please don't CC me when replying to the list)
