== Fedora Core 5's missing 32-bit shared library symlinks

For my sins, I decided that my new machine should run the 64-bit version
of Fedora Core 5. I knew this was going to be somewhat painful, because
various important things (such as Flash and Sun's Java) don't yet have
64-bit versions; I was going to have to build 32-bit versions of things
like Firefox in order to use them.

Little did I know that Fedora has made it all but impossible to compile
a 32-bit version of anything more complicated than a 'Hello World'
program. Consider the following simple X11 program, extracted from the
_configure_ script for [[MPlayer http://www.mplayerhq.hu/]]:

_$ cat testit.c \\
#include <X11/Xlib.h> \\
#include <X11/Xutil.h> \\
int main(void) { (void) XCreateWindow(0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0); return 0; } \\
$ cc -m32 -o testit testit.c -lX11 \\
/usr/bin/ld: skipping incompatible /usr/lib64/libX11.so when searching for -lX11 \\
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lX11 \\
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status_

The error message is the clue, and here is the problem:

_$ echo /usr/lib/libX11.so* \\
/usr/lib/libX11.so.6 /usr/lib/libX11.so.6.2.0_

There should be a _/usr/lib/libX11.so_ symlink that points to the 32-bit
libX11 shared library, just like there is a 64-bit _libX11.so_ symlink
that _ld_ is helpfully telling us about in the error message (it's part
of the libX11-devel RPM). There isn't.

This isn't an isolated incident. On my Fedora Core 5 machine, there are
292 32-bit shared libraries in _/usr/lib_, from 113 different RPMs; 196
of them don't have the necessary symlink to actually compile 32-bit
programs. The broken 32-bit RPMs cover everything from _bzip2-libs_
through _readline_, including basically all of the X11 and core GTK
libraries. (Ironically, the KDE libraries are fine; advantage to KDE
[[again FC5FirstImpressions]]. Not that you'll be compiling many 32-bit
KDE programs with the basic X11 libraries unlinkable.)

Unless I'm missing something major, it's pretty clear to me that no one
at Red Hat actually tried to build real 32-bit applications under 64-bit
Fedora Core 5. I'm not even sure how they built the 32-bit versions of
the RPMs they ship as part of the system; I doubt the source RPMs will
actually rebuild on a normal 64-bit FC5 machine.

(As an experiment, I tried rebuilding the 32-bit ImageMagick RPM; it
blew up more or less on schedule.)

=== Sidebar: the manual fix

If you want to fix this manually, it's relatively simple: for
every affected 32-bit shared library, just go to _/usr/lib_
and symlink _lib~~What~~.so_ to the current version of
_lib~~What~~.so.~~blah.blah~~_. The tricky bits are:

# finding every affected 32-bit library that you care about
  (usually you find them by having programs fail to link, which
  is a bit tedious), and
# figuring out what the current version is. (Fortunately, only
  a few things have multiple versions of the same shared library.)

I will probably wind up writing some sort of program to do this for me.
That I need such a program, and that I need to mangle my system outside
of RPMs, irritates the heck out of me.

The better fix presumably starts with a mass bug filing in the [[Red
Hat Bugzilla https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/]]. The temptation to
automate it is strong; after all, I do have _curl_ lying around.