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Recent changes completely break 32bit snaps

View original Launchpad issue

Metadata

Project
snapcraft (launchpad)
Number
#1933224
Type
issue
State
open
Author
~ogra
Labels
craft-337
Created
Updated
Closed
—

Current evaluation

Snapcraft silently filters libraries from base snaps, breaking 32-bit multi-arch ARM snaps (build-on armhf, run-on arm64) by dropping 32-bit libs not present in the 64-bit base. Reporter requests louder warnings and an opt-out switch. No maintainer response in ~5 years.

Suggested action: needs triage

Reason: Zero comments and no maintainer interaction for ~5 years (last activity 1805 days ago), but the issue is a genuine bug/feature request from a core snap developer (ogra), not a support question, and the underlying concern—silent behavior changes breaking multi-arch 32-bit snaps—has no evidence of being resolved in the current codebase. It lacks labels beyond a tracking tag and shows no sign of triage, so it needs a maintainer to assess whether the base-lib filtering still drops 32-bit libs and whether an opt-out exists.

Impact: 55 Quick Win: 13.75 Staleness: 90 Complexity: 75 Confidence: 55 Support Request: 10

Issue body

I (Oliver Grawert) have a lot of snaps for the pi that need to use hardware acceleration. for this i need to use the binary library blobs from the pi foundation which are only available in 32bit versions ... since all our 64bit base snaps have been designed with the ability of running 32bit binaries by seeding a base set of libc and friends for 32bit support, this has always worked fine when building on a 32bit host and declaring: architectures:   - build-on: armhf     run-on: [ armhf, arm64 ] ... which then creates a _multi.snap file ... recently snapcraft added filtering of all libs from the base snaps with no warning, not way to override this behaviour ... since this does not cause a build error this results in releasing snaps with missing libraries (there is not the full set of libs for 32bit support in the base and it would bloat the base massively if we duplicated everything) ... could we:     a) pretty pretty please make some more noise about such changes, all my Pi snaps have been broken for months in edge and only a user pointing that out to me made me even aware of this breakage and this is not the first time of having quiet changes breaking something.     b) have a switch to keep the old behaviour for multi arch packages so developers do not need to manually seed additional 60 libs

Evaluation history

Date Model Scores Action Summary
qwen/qwen3.8-27b
Impact: 55
Quick Win: 13.75
Staleness: 90
Complexity: 75
Confidence: 55
Support Request: 10
needs triage Snapcraft silently filters libraries from base snaps, breaking 32-bit multi-arch ARM snaps (build-on armhf, run-on arm64) by dropping 32-bit libs not present in the 64-bit base. Reporter requests louder warnings and an opt-out switch. No maintainer response in ~5 years.
qwen/qwen3.6-35b-a3b
Staleness: 95
Complexity: 60
Confidence: 85
Support Request: 10
close stale Snapcraft silently filters base snap libraries, breaking 32-bit multi-arch builds on ARM. Unaddressed for nearly 5 years with no maintainer response.
qwen/qwen3.6-35b-a3b
Staleness: 95
Complexity: 60
Confidence: 85
Support Request: 10
close stale Unresolved report from 2020 detailing how recent Snapcraft changes broke 32-bit multi-arch snap builds by filtering base libraries. No maintainer response or comments in nearly five years.
qwen3.6-35b-a3b-mtp-q6
Staleness: 98
Complexity: 60
Confidence: 70
Support Request: 10
close stale Reports a breaking change in snapcraft that filters 32-bit libraries from base snaps, breaking multi-arch Pi snaps. Unaddressed for nearly 5 years with no maintainer response.
qwen3.6-35b-a3b-mtp-q6
Staleness: 95
Complexity: 45
Confidence: 80
Support Request: 20
close stale Reports a silent breaking change in snapcraft that filters libraries from base snaps, breaking 32-bit multi-arch builds. Unanswered for nearly 5 years, likely obsolete due to significant tool updates.

Update history

No update history recorded yet.

Related issues

Issue Project State Summary Similarity
#1641123 snapcraft does not properly detect the architecture when kernel is 64 bits but userspace is 32 snapcraft (launchpad) closed Closed without resolution. Snapcraft incorrectly identified arm64 architecture in 64-bit kernel/32-bit userspace chroots, generating mismatched snaps. The report was abandoned due to inactivity.
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