Comment 0 for bug 1123710

If a user wants 32-bit only wine, a reasonable way to get it would be to install wine1.4:i386. However, this is not possible on amd64. Currently apt spews this complaint:

 wine1.4:i386 : Depends: wine1.4-i386:i386 (= 1.4.1-0ubuntu4)
                Recommends: gnome-exe-thumbnailer:i386 but it is not installable or
                            kde-runtime:i386 but it is not going to be installed
                Recommends: ttf-droid:i386 but it is not installable
                Recommends: ttf-liberation:i386 but it is not installable
                Recommends: ttf-mscorefonts-installer:i386
                Recommends: ttf-umefont:i386 but it is not installable
                Recommends: ttf-unfonts-core:i386 but it is not installable
                Recommends: ttf-wqy-microhei:i386 but it is not installable
                Recommends: winetricks:i386 but it is not going to be installed
                Recommends: xdg-utils:i386 but it is not installable

gnome-exe-thumbnailer, xdg-utils, and the fonts are arch: all and should be marked multiarch:foreign to indicate that it is ok to install them for the nonnative wine1.4 (they are cross-arch shell scripts). winetricks is currently arch i386 and amd64 and should probably be marked arch: all (especially for upcoming arm wine).

apt will then freak out about conflicts and give up. apt-get --no-install-recommends wine1.4:i386, however, will actually complete. I'm not sure this is correct behavior for apt, as in principle it should be able to figure out that it can succeed with the command by omitting recommended packages.