Many Linux distributions ship two flavours of a port on a amd64 systems:
- A native 64-bit port, and
- The 32-bit libraries (cross-compiled)
We haven't had the need for such ports, except for one major exception: Wine. Wine requires the 32-bit libraries in order to run 32-bit Windows binaries on FreeBSD/amd64. Up until now Wine ships those 32-bit libraries internally. This situation is less ideal for many reasons:
- The libraries are provided "pre-compiled" - independent of the Ports building infrastructure
- The libraries only get updated when wine itself is updated
- Building locally is a non-trivial undertaking
By introducing this USES (and adapting the ports required by Wine) we will be able to build Wine (native, i386 and wow64 [a new addition]) without any issue.