Fedora Has Deferred Its Decision On Stopping Modular/Everything i686 Repositories

The recent proposal to drop Fedora's Modular and Everything repositories for the upcoming Fedora 31 release is yet to be decided after it was deferred at this week's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) meeting.

The proposal is about ending the i686 Modular and Everything repositories beginning with the Fedora 31 cycle later this year. But this isn't about ending multi-lib support, so 32-bit packages will continue to work from Fedora x86_64 installations. But as is the trend now, if you are still running pure i686 (32-bit x86) Linux distributions, your days are numbered. Separately, Fedora is already looking to drop their i686 kernels moving forward and they are not the only Linux distribution pushing for the long overdue retirement of x86 32-bit operating system support.

At Monday's FESCo meeting, the decision whether to approve this change was deferred on the basis of an open question of whether this would cause issues over the process of building modules locally if i686 Modular/Everything composes are not available. That is now being investigated.

There is two weeks to the beta freeze to get this sorted out otherwise the dropping of these i686 repositories would be postponed until Fedora 32 next year. More details via the meeting minutes.